What You Don't Know About Greg Lestrade
by LastSaskatchewanSpacePirate
Summary: What it says on the tin.
1. Part 1

_I felt a need to do this. _

_So basically, Lestrade is my favourite character in the history of ever, and quite frankly Rupert Graves is bloody gorgeous. And I have a ridiculous amount of headcanons for him that were just sitting round gathering dust in a box in my brain. So here is my THINGS YOU DONT KNOW ABOUT GREG LESTRADE._

_This is not the last. This is but chapter one. There are many more coming. _

_No specific pairing, but I fear there could be some Lestrade/Molly (I'm hoping the ship name Mole Trading will catch on) in later chapters because I ship those two q uite passionately._

_But enough about me: let's hear about Lestrade. _

_If you've read this much, thanks. Now keep going._

_And apologies in advance for my Canada._

* * *

**He's a musician at heart. **

**For every moment he wishes he was Sherlock** - and there's quite a few - **there's a moment he thanks God he isn't**, because he's seen what that man's gone through.

**He can sing.** Like, well. Very well. But it's rare you'll hear him outside of the shower.

**He has a thing for redheads.** But he's never actually dated one. He just stares at them on the street. But not in a creepy way.

**He has a motorcycle.** He's been riding since he was a teenager, but he hardly touches it now. Maybe he should.

**He can eat an entire cheesecake in one sitting. **It was a bet so the calories don't count.

**Whenever he makes Sherlock smile, he feels like he's just won a very prestigious award.** It's the greatest feeling in the world.

**His favourite new series companion is Rose.** But for some reason he feels as though he shouldn't tell people that.

**He's reasonably sure Sherlock and John are secretly married. **

**He's good at football. **

**He's sterile.** Infertile. He can't have children. And it breaks his heart.

**He was the lead singer in his high school rock band.**

**He's seen some really terrible things. **

**It kind of bothers him Sherlock didn't know his name.** I mean, it's a one-syllable name. He must have room for it somewhere in that head of his.

**He had his first kiss when he was nine.** She moved away that summer. She was the first girl he ever lost.

**He remembers every single time he's ever shot that gun to kill. **

**Anderson really, really pisses him off sometimes. **

**He grew up in the country. **His family moved to London when he was eleven.

**He's a film buff. **Name any movie and he'll give you a plot synopsis, director, full cast list, rating out of ten and throw in some fun facts for good measure. He has a basement full of DVDs and a huge home entertainment system. There isn't much else to do when you live alone.

**Sometimes he cries at said films. **Quite often, actually. If they're sad. And it's not like there's anyone to see him.

**He had to give Sherlock mouth-to-mouth once. **You really shouldn't mention it in front of either of them.

**He never misses work. **Even when he's sick. Even when he's very sick. He's dedicated, sure, yes, but mostly it's because being home alone when you're sick is really awful.

**He knows how to deactivate the smoke alarms in the toilets at the Yard, and sometimes he will so he can go in there and smoke without being detected.** He goes home immediately after to shower and change, so that not even Sherlock can tell. He's betraying Sherlock and he feels awful, and filthy. But quitting is hard, and he's weak.

**He's been involved in only three serious relationships. **

**Sometimes he figures things out on his own, but he lets Sherlock tell him anyways. **

**He has this problem where he can't stop drawing on his hands.** He's had to take all the sharpies out of his desk and hide them because it distracts him from work. He spent his teenage years with his hands covered in ink. Someone told him you can get cancer from that. He thinks it was Gregson, though, and he doesn't really care what Gregson thinks anyways.

**He played trombone in high school**, but he dropped it after he graduated. **Same with his guitar**, but for a completely different reason.

**He's been shot twice**. The first was a clean shot through his thigh. The second was his chest. Just below the lungs, just above the abdomen. The bullet embedded itself in his spine and he was paralysed waist-down for about a month. They told him it would be his whole life. Spinal surgery, and then therapy for months, and he could walk again. But he never takes walking for granted. Never.

**He took that bullet for Sherlock.** Jumped in front of him at the last minute. And he still doesn't regret it.

**He doesn't have many friends.** It's strange, that. Primary school, high school, he was the most popular kid in the class. The grade, even. In Oxford, still, people were drawn to him. He graduated with a good circle of friends. But they've all moved on, been married, had children, and they're in a world he can't quite reach. Not their fault, for moving on, it's his, for standing still. He's at a point now where his closest friends are John and Oh-what's-your-name-again Sherlock Holmes, and it's a bit odd, but he doesn't mind it at all.

**He still meets with his old friends**, in bars, restaurants, but it's less and less of a gathering and more and more of a duty. They grill him about his job, and Sherlock, and his life they find so terribly exciting. They tell him how lucky he is, and he offers to trade. They think he's joking. He's not.

**He played basketball, football and rugby in high school.** Still could, probably. But he doesn't have anyone to play with.

**He loves the idea of pickup trucks** - there's something odd and romantic about them, something special, a ghost of summers and country roads and wide black skies full of stars. There is no use for them in London, but sometimes now he looks at his car and wishes he had one. He's not sure why he's so drawn to them. Although Sherlock would probably just make him cart around dead bodies in it.

**He's never had a one night stand.** It's his go-to whenever the drinking games start up and someone suggests "I Never." He's not really sure why. He supposes it's because he likes it to mean something. Dimmock thinks this is beautiful. Donovan thinks this is ridiculous. Sherlock doesn't know what a one night stand is, and John has to explain it.

**He wrote dozens and dozens of songs** in high school, for his band. He doesn't remember any of them now, save one. But bits and pieces come to him sometimes, and he'll sing them aloud, or hum them out, only to forget them in the next second. He thinks if he wasn't a cop he would have been a musician.

**He witnessed almost all of Sherlock's detox** and it was horrible.

**Once, when Sherlock was cleaning up, he came by, just on a whim, and took Sherlock out to look at stars**. He figured it would be twenty minutes at most before Sherlock got bored or the two of them got into a screaming row. But they spent three hours out on the hillside, and Sherlock never once complained. They hardly said a word to each other, but Lestrade thinks those three hours were the best conversation he's ever had with anyone.

**He started going grey around the time he met Sherlock.** More than enough said, really.

**His favourite kind of ice cream is plain chocolate.** He hates it when you add all those little chocolate chips and brownie pieces and cookie-dough chunks and fudge icing and rubbish. People should enjoy chocolate for chocolate's sake. Really.

**He eats when he's stressed. **Which is a lot. But you try putting up with Sherlock without gaining a few pounds.

**He has this weird urge sometimes to learn how to ballroom dance. **He doesn't know why. It's not like he has anyone to dance with.

**Rebecca.** He met her through his school musical. He was sixteen and trying out for the male lead. Usually it was the oldest students in the title roles, but Lestrade was anything but usual and he got the part. The day they called him down to the theatre department to tell him the news was the day he met Rebecca. She was on set design, and had come to the drama office to get a key to the storage room. That was why she thought she was there, but the truth, Lestrade later decided, was that she'd been sent there. To congratulate him as he walked out of the office, beaming. To strike up that conversation, to make that lunch date, to toss her brown hair over her shoulder in that way he adored. She was sent there for him. To make him better.

Even later, of course, he decided that she'd been sent there just to tear him apart.

If he'd never met her, he'd never had had to lose her.

They were friends, and then best friends, and then they were dating, through the end of that year and all through the summer, and the year after. And when auditions came round for the musical he convinced Rebecca to try out. She was a phenomenal actress and a beautiful singer and she made female lead effortlessly, while Greg had the starring role again. Maybe he should have seen then that it was all too perfect. But he didn't. He was too busy. Musical consumed both their lives, but they never fell behind in their schoolwork, they always made time to study together. The car crash was two months before opening night.

No one ever expected Greg or Rebecca's understudies to see any stage time. The two were completely devoted to the performance. But on opening night both the understudies took the stage for them.

The first thing you learn as an actor is that the show must go on. But Greg wasn't an actor. He was a singer.

**He wrote her three songs**, one for her birthday and two more just because. He sang them to her whenever he could, and sometimes she'd pick up the words quickly and sing a duet part in her delicate soprano. She never tired of having him sing to her. His band picked up her favourite of the three, _Ten Thirty Indigo Skies_, and won a thousand quid cash prize in the local talent competition. That remained their biggest claim to fame - the band never made it far. But she came up to him and kissed him at the end of the piece, and that was worth more than a thousand quid any day of the week, and he was happy.

**He named that song for her favourite colour. **You asked Rebecca what her favourite colour was, and she would tell you purple. But Greg alone knew that her favourite colour was the beautiful deep shade of blue-purple the sky turned around ten thirty, that made the stars stand out like nothing else. A good part of their lives were spent sitting out on the roof of Greg's house watching the stars, and they knew the colours of the sky very well. But the deep purple-blue, the one they named 10:30 indigo, was always her favourite. They'd once spent many hours and countless bottles of Rebecca's paint - she was a painter - trying to replicate it. But they found it impossible. Rebecca wasn't fazed. "Some things aren't meant to be captured." she said. "Some things you just have to experience." So they abandoned the paint and laid back on the roof together as the sky turned to 10:30 indigo and the stars shone like diamonds.

**He was going to ask her to marry him**. He thinks the best moments of his life were spent on that roof under 10:30 indigo skies. He'd decided, he'd dreamed, that when - it had been a when, not even an if, even at seventeen years old, - he proposed to her it would be under a 10:30 indigo sky full of stars.

**He sang **_**Ten Thirty Indigo Skies**_** for the last time at her funeral.** There was a memorial, and everyone from his school came, everyone who'd heard him belt out those same lines on a stage lit with all the glitz and the trappings of a high school auditorium, and he sang that song for the very last time in his life. For her, one last time. And never again. He stopped singing. He hung up his guitar. But he still knows every word, every chord. He's forgotten every other song he once wrote for his high school band - hell, he's forgotten the _name_ of his high school band, the name that's importance was second only to Rebecca Lindsey in his high school life - but he'll never forget a word of Ten Thirty Indigo Skies.

**He can't remember her. **He's forgotten her handwriting, the smell of her perfume, the length of her hair, the name of her dog. Her face is a blur in his memory. It hurts sometimes, to think he's forgetting her. But he'll never forget a damn word of _Ten Thirty Indigo Skies_. And almost every night round ten thirty he'll look out the window and wonder if that's a good thing or not.

**He's going to sell his house.** One day. He'll buy a nice little place. A proper London flat, tiny and cramped and barely enough room to move. It's too big. Four bedrooms, two and a half baths? He doesn't know what the hell he was thinking. Actually, he does. He was thinking he would have a family there. A wife who didn't cheat, kids to fill the bedrooms, a dog, even. He likes dogs. But that's stupid and impossible and he pretends he doesn't know what the hell he was thinking buying a house because knowing he has to give up on that dream is more painful than it should be.

**People thought he was gay for his first year and a half of university. **Of course no one tells him this until his wedding. Turns out it was a general consensus on campus. He's not sure if he should be offended. But then, he never looked at girls. He'd had his heart broken enough. Love scared him. He was afraid to fall in love again. So he didn't.

**He thought she was the one.** He met her half-way through his second year at Oxford. He didn't want to fall in love. Love meant eventual heartbreak, and his heart was far too fragile to risk that again. But she strengthened him. Built him back up, taught him to love again, to trust again. And when they were out of university he asked her to marry him.

Twenty five years later she was sleeping with a gym teacher.

Funny how things work out.

**His favourite Beatles song is "Hey Jude"** _So let it out and let it in, Hey Jude, begin, you're waiting for someone to perform with..._

**He loves the rain. **People complain about gray, rainy London, but he likes the rain. It's calming, it's beautiful, it helps him think. And in the rain, no one can tell if you're crying or not.

**Some nights he sleeps in his desk chair. **Sometimes there's so much work he just doesn't bother leaving. It's not like he has anything to go home to. Sometimes it's not even a decision, he just passes out late one night and wakes up eight hours later.

**He thinks he's meant to be alone. **


	2. Part 2

**His birthday is July 9th. **One year Sherlock actually remembered. But the next he had deleted it to make room for a new type of tobacco ash.

**He still watches stars from his rooftop. **The roof outside his bedroom window is near flat, just like when he was a teenager, and just like when he was a teenager he crawls out the window some nights to lie on the roof and look up at the sky. It's wonderful, and peaceful, and it helps him think, but when he thinks too much he starts to cry. So he tries not to think, just stares up into the stars and pretends he's falling – no, flying, - flying through space and he focuses on that and tries not to wish he had someone lying next to him so that they could fly through those stars together.

**He grew up reading detective novels. **

**One of the happiest moments of his life was the time he heard himself on the radio. **His high school band had won some contest – or – other, they were always entering contests in those days. It was sponsored by some big name radio station, and first place winners had their song played on the radio. He remembers sitting around with his band in the front yard, jean shorts and bare feet and all the trappings of lazy summer afternoons – when Rebecca came running up the drive screaming for them to turn on the radio. And then he remembers screaming and jumping and hugging and kissing and running through town like madmen in bare feet with the radio hoisted on their shoulders like a trophy and he remembers no other day in his past in which he's felt quite so happy.

**He prefers tea to coffee. **

**His favourite time of year is the summer. **Summer is long warm nights and brilliant sun and barbeques and bare feet and picnics in the park. It's blue skies and freedom and swimming pools and parties after dark and no responsibilities. At least that's what it looks like outside his office window.

**He'd die for Sherlock without even thinking about it, and sometimes that scares him. **

**He goes running a lot. **Most mornings he wakes up early and takes a run. He feels sometimes that he's spent his whole life running. Running away. He runs and runs until he physically can't go any further, until he collapses to the curb in a mess of sweat and exhaustion and headphones. Then he sits for awhile, reaches instinctively for a cigarette he can't have, watching the cars go by and listening to music. He always brings music. The alternative is being alone with his thoughts. When he's sat for long enough he gets up and jogs home.

**He's jealous sometimes, of how close John's gotten to Sherlock in such a short time. **

**He didn't have a date for his prom. **The obvious choice was dead and buried a year ago. He hadn't looked at a girl since. Except -

But she didn't count, Emily, with her long blonde hair and gentle smile and bright eyes. She was just a friend. A friend he hadn't even wanted. He'd closed himself off after the car crash, pushed away all his friends, built up walls around himself. But she'd gotten in. And maybe it was a good thing, she was kind, and she was caring, and she was a good listener, and she helped. She came to him at his most vulnerable and she helped and she healed, and she picked him back up as much as anyone could. So it was a good thing. The issue, the problem, was that she'd gotten through the walls to his heart as well.

He wouldn't admit to himself what he felt for her. He didn't admit it to her, and that was good, because whatever it was she wouldn't return it. But he could ask her to prom. Just as friends.

She apologies. A dozen times, two dozen. She talks about breaking the date she already made, the boyfriend he didn't know she had. He refuses. It's fine, he's fine. He's sorry. No problem at all, really. And that night the most popular boy in school sits alone and cries.

**He never told her he loved her.** How many times, how many times had those words been on his lips, burning in the back of his mind? But he couldn't say it. He was afraid. Not of rejection, he was afraid she would feel the same. He was afraid of love. And time goes by, and he'll tell her later, and she breaks up with her boyfriend and maybe he should tell her now, but he can't he can't...And then they're going to separate universities and he should tell her, tell her now, but it will never work out, she'll just break your heart... And grad day she comes up to him and hugs him, and it's a goodbye hug, and he should just say it...

But he's scared.

And he doesn't tell her.

**Growing up, his bedroom was painted dark blue and had two windows. **

**He held onto that marriage for way longer than he should have. **But he still wishes they had held on, just a bit longer. Maybe if they had had kids they would have tried harder to make it work. But there's a lot of "maybe if we had had kids" thoughts in his mind and he's learned to just ignore them.

**He's broken his leg three times. **His ankle: five, his wrist: two, his arm once.

**He sings in front of his mirror. **Into a hairbrush. While getting ready for work. More than he cares to admit. He picked up the habit in elementary school, and he's never stopped. The mirror is his audience. It's exhilarating, and it's not like anyone can hear him.

**He never uses red pens. **He hates them. They drive him crazy. Blue, black, or nothing.

**He still can't figure out how to set his damn watch. **He threw the little instruction sheet out with the packaging. He's always hitting the little buttons, hurting his fingers, and he can't figure out what buttons to push and in what order, and when he gets the little numbers to flash like they're supposed to he can't figure out how to make them go up, and then he hits the wrong button and has to start over, and then it ends up in 24 hour clock and the pm and am get the wrong way round and the damn thing claims it's tuesday when really it's friday. Dimmock is one of those people who can pick up any watch, effortlessly press a few buttons and have the date, time, year, month, phase of the moon set within four seconds. But he's not about to ask Dimmock – or anyone – for help to set his watch. So he goes around with pm where the am should be and subtracting twenty-three minutes from everything because he's 48 years old and Detective Inspector for Scotland Yard but he can't set a damn wristwatch.

**Whenever he buys a newspaper he flips straight to the comics. **The news is too damn depressing sometimes. He'll get around to it later, the murders, the crimes, the public events, the weather forecasts, the editorials... But he likes to read the comics first.

**Whenever there's a thunderstorm, he counts the seconds between the lightning and the thunder.** It's automatic, he can't help it. A childhood habit he never quite outgrew.

**His favourite kind of pie is lemon meringue. **

**He took french in high school. **He remembers a bit. Mainly "Voulez-vous dormir avec moi?" (would you like to sleep with me.) The rest is faded from his memory. But he can pick words out and define them when he hears the language. Provided you don't talk too fast.

**Red wine over white wine.** Any day. But beer over them both.

**He's an only child. **Born to be alone. He never had any brothers or sisters, and it never bothered him, he always had enough friends to compensate. But now sometimes he wishes. Just for someone to talk to, really talk to. Just for someone to spend Christmas with. Brother or sister, he's not picky. Just so long as they aren't like Mycroft.

**He drives over the speed limit a lot. **Which is kind of a bad thing, he thinks.

**He has a long scar on his left arm. **He has scars all over his body, he leads a life of risks, but it's this one that stands out the most. He changes the subject when people ask about it. He tells Sherlock that he crashed his motorbike, because Sherlock doesn't remember picking up that knife and Lestrade doesn't want him too. Sherlock was afraid, and Sherlock was detoxing, and it was Lestrade's fault for trying to touch him. Sherlock knows he's lying, Sherlock knows everything, but he doesn't seem to know what really happened, or if he does he doesn't say, but Lestrade hopes he doesn't because it wasn't Sherlock's fault. Lestrade can blame Sherlock for a lot of things, but not that one.

**People say the gray hair suits him, but he wishes sometimes it was still brown. **

**He never takes sick days or days off. **He's dedicated to the work. And what's he going to do with a day off anyways?

**He's a strong swimmer. **Front crawl, backstroke, sidestroke, butterfly, everything. Certified lifeguard and all that. Growing up he spent his summers in the water, only getting out for dinner. Sometimes now he goes to a pool and swims laps to get his frustrations out, but it's a bit of a drive, and an awful lot of work, and then he has to go find a swimsuit and everything, and he sticks to running because it's easier.

**He absolutely despises those touch-screen keyboards. **

**He gives Sherlock a key to his house. **In case of emergencies. Sherlock promises not to use it unless it's an emergency. So when he wants to steal Lestrade's milk, use his laptop, wear his clothes, he just breaks in.

**John and Sherlock are going to grow old together and he is going to die alone. **It's not really fair. Life isn't fair, he supposes. But the infrequency with which it's unfair in his own favour is rather annoying.

**He got his first guitar as a Christmas present. **He had two, growing up, an electric and an acoustic. It was Christmas of '77, and all he'd asked for as a present was some hockey pucks – (they were always losing their hockey pucks, he and his friends, over fences, in snowbanks, heading out night after night in the manner of thirteen year olds to play on the ice rink near his house). He knew they couldn't afford much by way of presents. And that was okay.

But the guitars -

He passed a music store on the way to school every morning, and sometimes he left early so he could stop his bike and look through the windows for a bit. Shining polished wood, sunlight glinting off the frets, oh, they were beautiful. His fingers itched. He'd considered selling his bike or his radio, his only two possessions of real value. But then how would he get to school, without a bike, and life without his radio, without music, was unthinkable. So he lent out his football, his bike, his chemistry homework, anything, to borrow guitars off friends and acquaintances. Jerry, one of his best mates (you had multiple best friends at thirteen years old) had a father who owned multiple guitars, and they hung on the walls of the rec room and Greg made excuses to come over and just to look at them.

And then it was Christmas '77, and he got a whole mess of hockey pucks to make up for all the ones he'd lost, and he was getting his stick from the downstairs closet to go play with his friends when his parents brought out the guitar. The guitar for which they'd saved and scrimped and worked extra hours.

His guitar.

**It still hangs on the wall above his bed.** He never plays it, hasn't touched it since Rebecca, but still it hangs there, a memory of that Christmas, his parents, that childhood, that time. Of how much music meant to him. Of afternoons outside with Rebecca and a picnic lunch and that guitar. Of evenings by the water, alone but for his guitar and his Rebecca and a long drive back to London. Sherlock stands on his bed and tries to touch it, but Lestrade shoves him off. There's some things he doesn't want Sherlock knowing.

**He played that guitar until his fingers bled. **That was his outlet as a teenager. Now he drinks, or smokes, or runs. As a teenager he played. Every heartbreak, every frustration, every pain and anger and hurt until the strings tore his fingers apart and the frets were wet with blood. He never touched a guitar pick. It felt more real with his fingers. They took it away from him a month after Rebecca died because he was in danger of losing his fingertips. He never played again. Too many memories. He kept his fingers wrapped in bandages, and then they healed, and he healed (as much as he could) and he moved on, and the bloody mess of his fingertips faded to scars. But he left the guitar behind him. It just gathers dust now, has been since he was seventeen, but from Christmas of '77 to a month after that car crash in 1980 that guitar was his outlet for everything.

**He's not okay. **He acts it so convincingly that sometimes he forgets he's acting. But it's still there, at the back of his mind, the bottom of his heart, the Not Okay. No one else knows. They swallow the performance hook line and sinker, which is what he wants, really. Even though sometimes he wishes he acted Okay a little less well. Even if sometimes he wishes just one person would see the Not Okay in his eyes, would see the actor behind the mask. He wants someone to see, and to try to help. Even if it's just a hug. He wants -

But no one sees. No one realizes. He's very much Not Okay but he spends his life devoted to acting Okay and the world sees and swallows and falls for it. Sometimes he wishes he was less good of an actor.

He supposes he's had a lot of practice.


	3. Part 3

_**I would like to say thank you – thank you thank you thank you and a million hugs to Sam for pointing out all my terrible inaccuracies when I failed to cross the cultural divide between the UK and my own country. I had a terrible feeling my Canada was showing all over the place and I didn't know how to fix it because I didn't know what I was doing wrong. So I would just like to say thank you very much [even though you did not sign your review and i cannot pm you and i hope you see this because i am very grateful] although I'm reasonably sure I knew some of that which means I was just being lazy dfijfifldfnjgdfu stupid Canada. I just wanted to say that I appreciate it very much, even though I find the fact that you do not have extra crunchy peanut butter rather depressing.**_

If you are not Sam you may read all that stuff down there now ****

He counts to five. When he's scared, when he's terrified, when he's panicking. When he's going into shock. When he's in pain. He stops and he counts to five inside his head, and for those five seconds he's blind and terrified. He panics, he cries, he lets it get the best of him. But just for five seconds. And after those five he decides what he's going to do and he does it. It's his trick. He counts inside his head, he counts them out loud, but he always counts five seconds. And that's all he gets. ****

He thinks he might have stared at Molly during that Christmas party. Quite a bit. Openly. In all fairness, she looked very good in that dress. But he's sure no one noticed.

**He gets this thrill of deepest pride whenever someone calls him a hero. **

**He had a goldfish once. **He's not sure if he's a cat person or a dog person, he never gave it much thought. He's never owned a pet, but he buys a fish one day, just on a whim. He thinks it might have been because he was just very lonely that day and wanted the company, which is really lame, because it's a fish for god's sake and it dies about a week later anyways. He suspects he didn't take good enough care of it. He finds it floating belly-up in the tank one morning and he feels like a failure, and he's pretty upset considering he never even named the damn thing.

**He's terrified that he's going to find Sherlock the same way one day because he didn't take good enough care of him. **

**He always gives money to the kids he sees playing guitar on the streets. **They're outside the tube, on street corners, smack in the middle of the sidewalk with people pushing round them on both sides. Their guitar cases are open, the red or blue or green lining speckled with a few coins and notes. He always gives them something, and it's rare it's less than a tenner. If he finds someone playing one of his old favourites he empties out his wallet. He can't help himself. He loves them, those kids, musicians and dreamers, who stare at him with surprise and wonder when he hands over the money. He just keeps walking. They remind him of himself. It's rare he sees the same kid twice, they leave, find other street corners, other willing audiences. He hopes every one of them is still out there somewhere, still playing, still happy.

He hopes they're not lonely.

He hopes they're still playing.

He hopes they haven't turned out like him.

**The password for his computer is 1234567890. **Kind of a stupid password. But no one's figured it out yet.

**He gets claustrophobic. **Not to an extreme, it's not a genuine phobia, but it doesn't make those tiny enclosed spaces any more comfortable. He cringes at sewers, at tunnels, anything that has a roof no further than a foot over his head. And god forbid he should have to get down his knees and crawl through something. Any place he can't stand up, where the four walls are pressing in around him, makes him feel sick. Under beds. Ventilation shafts – (he's still not sure how Sherlock got him into that one.), the trunks of cars... ****

Dimmock locked him in the trunk of the cruiser once. They were having a heated debate about whether or not Lestrade could fit into the trunk (well obviously he could, they could carry bodies in there, after all, and was Dimmock calling him fat, anyone could fit in there, he would prove it.) Of course he fell for it hook, line and sinker, and the second he was inside the trunk Dimmock slammed the lid on him. Which was all very funny for about ten seconds, at which point Lestrade realized that he still hadn't opened the lid again. So he gave it a good kick and he yelled all sorts of colourful obscenities at Dimmock, and when no one came to his rescue he pounded on the lid with both hands, and still no one opened the lid, and as his eyes adjusted to the light he could see the outline of the lid of the trunk above him and the four walls around him and he forgot everything and kept pounding on the lid and yelling until he had to stop for fear that he'd start screaming and never be able to stop. He cried silently for five seconds. And at the end of those five seconds he scolded himself for crying, and then he stopped himself crying, but still he was locked in the trunk of the cruiser and he ended up lying there for near ten minutes (according to Dimmock – it felt like a year), paralysed by the fear, not screaming, not crying, not yelling for help. He lay there in silence until Dimmock opened the lid again, out of breath and apologizing, there had been a fire inside the building, and he had had to go, but he'd come back,and it was okay, and Lestrade broke his nose in two places and pretended that everything was okay after all.

**He kicks ass at Rock Band 3. **At least, he would, if he had anyone to play with.

**His wedding ring is at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean. **It was on the sixth day of their failed "let's-fix-things" vacation that she handed back her own ring as they were standing side by side at the edge of the water. She told him that she was getting on a flight back to London that evening. He'd do best not to follow her. "It's over." she said. "You know it is." And then she dropped the ring he put on her finger all those years ago into his hand and turned and left him standing alone on the beach with the sun going down over the water. He threw hers first. Then he tore his own from his finger – it caught the knuckle coming off and scraped the skin and hurt – and then he pitched his own ring into the water after hers.

She'd put that ring on his finger and said "'till death do us part."

Funny how things work out.

**He needs to stop with the self-pity. **It's getting old. You don't get anywhere in life by crying yourself to sleep. That doesn't help. You're not entitled to anything in life, so you really shouldn't go around thinking you don't deserve whatever you get.

**It's easier said than done. **It doesn't matter what he tells himself, he still ends up crying himself to sleep some nights. He hates himself for it, but what can you do. It's very well to tell yourself to stop caring. It's another entirely to actually do it.

**He has pictures of flats all over his fridge. **Nice little places, no more of this two-story-four-bedroom-two-and-a-half-baths. Flats for one man. Like he should own. But somehow, he can't give up the house. Can't give up the dream. Can't give up what he'll never ever have. The clippings stay on his fridge – printouts from the internet, clipped from the newspaper, magazines... but he never goes any further.

**He's uncomfortable in his suits. **Give him t-shirts, give him jumpers, give him old worn out jeans, please. The suit and tie business is an inconvenience. He just wants to be comfortable.

**He likes his steak medium rare. **

**He loves his team. **Dimmock is arrogant, Anderson is stupid, Donovan is rude and Gregson is an outright pain in the ass. They piss him off sometimes, all of them. But he knows every name, every junior officer, every constable, every single man and woman at New Scotland Yard. They're a family. They quarrel and argue and act like children, they make and lose bets and they steal each other's things. They make fun of his weight and his hair. But they love each other like family, and he's hit with a burning sense of pride when he sees them all standing round a crime scene. His team. He's woken up in the hospital to them clustered round his bedside, having broken every of the hospital's rules to be there. He's been in the middle of a couple of team group hugs, and they're absolutely the best feeling he's ever had. They're a constant in his life, and he loves every last one of them. Even Anderson.

Kind of.

Sometimes.

**He has a chip out of one of his back teeth. **He's always running his tongue over it when he's thinking. He tells people he got it from police work, but really he was trying to open a bottle of beer with his teeth. Just to see if he could. Which is pretty embarrassing. At least he wasn't in public: he'd been sitting alone in his kitchen when it occurred to him to try. Which kind of makes it all the more pathetic.

**He's going to buy a smaller bed. **He's struggling every morning to make a king size bed by himself. Dimmock thinks he's stupid. "What if you have a girl over?" Lestrade laughs for over a minute before he realizes Dimmock isn't joking.

**He never ignores texts from Sherlock. **Even if he doesn't reply, he reads them. Even if Sherlock's bored and sending him 50 in a row. Because he knows that the one time he ignores it is going to be the one time Sherlock really needs him, and he doesn't want to have to live with that.

**Sherlock Holmes is a great man and one day he is going to be a good one. **Lestrade knows it.

**Mycroft forbid him from visiting Sherlock while he was detoxing. **But he came anyways.  
He's never done everything Sherlock's brother tells him.

**He really dislikes golf. **It's useless. It's boring. The only time you work up a sweat is when it's the middle of summer and there's no shade anywhere on the damn course. Give him football, give him rugby, give him anything but bloody golf. He gets bored after two holes. The only entertainment comes when his opponents start fighting, but he can watch Donovan club people with hard objects whenever he likes at work, so moving from the office to the green doesn't really make a difference.

**Sunshine always puts him in a good mood. **It doesn't usually last long, but it's nice to wake up to sunlight through the curtains. The world is an awfully nice place when it's sunny, even if he hasn't anyone to share it with.

**He cleans the house on Sundays. **Every Sunday. He puts on loud music and goes around hoovering and dusting and scrubbing the windows and singing along at the top of his lungs.

**He thinks of Sherlock as a brother, or a son. **He'd be proud, really. But at the same time, he's really really really glad it isn't the case. He doesn't know if he could handle that. He has absolutely no clue how Mycroft does it, and Sherlock's father, wherever and whoever he is, deserves a medal.

**He took drama in high school.** At one point, he thought he was going to be an actor. But then, he thought the same about being a father. And happily married. And happy at all, really.

Funny how things work out.

**Batman over Superman. **Nothing wrong with Superman, he's the type of good-old-fashioned hero that Lestrade admires. But it's Batman, when it comes down to it. Because Batman's not born for this stuff. Batman doesn't have super-strength or super-speed or bullet impervious skin. He's an ordinary bloke who's in this race because he wants to see justice done. He's got all his gadgets, sure, but when it comes down to it, what's between him and death is guts and guts alone. Guts and a sense of law and order. Of justice. And that's what Lestrade admires.

**He's always loved superhero stories. **All superheroes. Marvel, or DC, they didn't matter to him as a kid, what mattered was men and women going out and saving the world, risking everything, because they believed that it should be done.

**Dimmock finds him reading comics at his desk. **He expects a mocking, but Dimmock is thrilled - "All right! Batman!" But Dimmock wants to talk about publication dates and first editions and compare writers, and Lestrade doesn't know what any of this means. He doesn't want to _collect_ comics, he wants to _read_ them. He's never seen the use in having things sitting around in boxes, all shiny and new and never-been-touched. Dimmock is horrified at the state of his comics - "You do not use The Incredible Hulk to keep the legs of your desk level!" - and the brief not-quite-friendship (Lestrade's not sure to this day how to describe his relationship with Dimmock) suffers. But it was something while it lasted.

**He never cared too much**** for Scarlett Johansson until he saw her Black Widow. **He'd seen her in movies – he owned more DVD's than your average rental place – but the second Iron Man film..."No wonder you haven't got a woman." says Dimmock, watching Lestrade devour some issue-or-other of some series-or-other of Batman (what does Lestrade care, it's Batman, that's the important bit.). "You're saving yourself for Catwoman." Lestrade says hell no, he's saving himself for Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow. He always did have that weakness for redheads. **  
**  
**He gets together with John to watch Doctor Who. **He's reasonably sure – pretty damn sure, actually, that Sherlock's always watching from the other side of the room. Whether it's to make sure he doesn't pull a move on John, or whether he actually likes the show he's deemed "Illogical and useless", Lestrade isn't quite sure. But whenever he turns round Sherlock is typing furiously on his laptop.

**He likes double hamburgers. **Hell, he likes triple hamburgers. The more meat the better. That's the important part.

**He hates mild salsa. **Do not get him started on mild salsa. And do not say the words "extra mild" to his face. The point of salsa is to be spicy. Without the heat, it's just tomatoes. No one wants a stupid can of smashed up tomatoes. All it tastes like is smashed up tomatoes. It's the most useless thing he's ever seen in his entire life, and it's existence drives him absolutely mad. Especially the fact that his wife was always buying it. And expecting him to use some of it. Well, hell if he was going to touch that. Maybe if they'd sorted out their opinions on salsa, things would be different. But there's a lot of " maybe if "'s going through Lestrade's head when he thinks about his wife, and he's learned to just ignore them.

**He doesn't like seedless watermelon either. **Watermelon is supposed to have big black seeds for spitting at people. That's the whole point. Today's kids are growing up not knowing how to spit watermelon seeds, and he thinks that's sad.

**He writes on his desk when he can't be bothered to find a scrap piece of paper. **

**There was this girl once. **And there was this summer. The very beginning of high school, just after freshman year and just before sophomore began. And her name was Lilly – two L's, and that had always enthralled him, fascinated him, her name as unique as she – and her family owned the cottage next to the one his was renting. She went to the same school, and they liked the same music, and that was more than enough. It was one summer – boating and swimming and barbecues and fires on the beach and sunsets on a dock – it was everything you ever wanted in a summer fling.

And then the leaves started turning.

It got too cold to swim, and they weren't anywhere near the water anymore anyways. They drove back to London and they went to school and he should have seen it coming, but he didn't. You're not supposed to put too much into a summer fling, and now he knows why. But that wasn't what he had wanted, that. He'd wanted her blonde hair and her shining eyes and her brilliant smile, and he'd wanted them for more than just a summer. But there were other guys who wanted that too, and she wanted them more than she wanted him, and that was the first time a woman broke his heart. But it was just a summer fling, after all.

**Crunchy peanut butter over smooth. **But not extra crunchy, that's weird.

**He has a gym membership, but he doesn't really use it much. **He likes running better. He can do push ups and situps on the floor of his bedroom anyways, and driving to the gym is just a hassle. Besides, he's pretty sure he lost that little membership card. And he looked awful in that picture. And there's always girls at that gym, which is bad, because one day they might talk to him, and there might be one with red hair, and then they might hit if off, and then they might go on a date, and then they might start a relationship, and then he's just going to get his heart broken all over again, so he's good with pushups on the floor next to his bed, thanks.

**He likes those shorts with all the pockets. **

**He drinks when he's upset. **A lot. Only when he's really upset, as he lives in a continuous state of upset and if that were true he would be drunk all the time. But there's nights, usually after a horrible case, or when his marriage goes to hell, or when he's just really lonely, that that's the last place to turn. It starts as an alternative to the cigarettes, and he's doing the right thing, he promised Sherlock he wouldn't smoke and he isn't, and everyone needs a vice, and hell if he doesn't deserve it... But he needs to stop thinking he deserves things, because he's not entitled to anything, not really, no one is. He stops going to public bars because there's no one to drive him home (and he never drives drunk, not ever, no matter what's impairing his judgement, not after Rebecca.) and he'd really rather not spend the night in a public bar should he pass out there. So he starts buying six-packs and drinking them at home until he passes out on his sofa, and then he'll wake, and throw up, and shower, and go to work, and tell himself it won't happen again. And it doesn't. For awhile. But it's a habit that's hard to shake.

**He keeps his keys on one of those little tourist keychains that says LONDON. **Keychains are supposed to help you keep track of your keys, but he loses them all the time anyways. And he has no clue what half of the keys on that thing do. Sherlock could probably find out, but he's reluctant to let Sherlock near them. Of course Sherlock has his own key to Lestrade's place, and he can get in without a key anyways, but he likes to feel that some part of his life is separate from Sherlock.

**He's pretty well off in terms of money. **Nowhere near rich, of course, but he's got enough, more than, even, considering he doesn't exactly have any reason to spend it. He buys groceries, and films, and donuts, and a lot of takeaway – he needs to start eating healthier, he really does – and he adds to the home entertainment system in his basement. He pays the bills and the mortgage. He pays for his car and his gas. But there's always some left over. Once it would have gone to anniversary presents. It should have gone to raising kids. It could go to his guitar – once upon a time all the money he owned in the world had gone to his guitar – except no matter what he told himself he should do, he'd probably never play it again. He doesn't know what to do with that money, so it sits around, and maybe that's a good thing, saving it for the future, but he probably won't have anything to do with it then either.

**He always gets jealous when he sees families at Christmas. **He's always jealous a bit when he sees families together, parents and children, being happy. He's learned to be happy for them instead. He's learned how to smile at them. And it's fine. But at Christmas he always feels just that much more lonely. Especially now when he has the house to himself, and himself alone. He doesn't even bother with a tree anymore, and it makes him sad, sometimes. He doesn't want to be that guy spending Christmas alone. Not that he has to. If he's not at Sherlock's, downing drinks and making small talk and listening to impossibly fast christmas carols played on a violin – not a single mistake, not ever – the Yard will be doing something (and Scotland Yard parties are, if he does say it, legendary.). He loves Sherlock, and he loves his team, but Christmas is for families, and he doesn't have one.

**He doesn't have a favourite movie. **People ask him, they see his extensive – (extensive being an understatement) – collection of DVD's, and they want to know. But that's too broad. You have to narrow it down to genre, at the very least. And even then it's hard. He just loves movies. Sometimes he loves some movies more than others, and sometimes he loves other ones. Sometimes he's in the mood for Butch Cassidy, and sometimes he's in the mood for The Dark Knight. Sometimes it's Titanic. Sometimes it's whatever brand new Hollywood flick just hit theatres. Sometimes it's a Hitchcock, sometimes it's The Shining. Indiana Jones. Holy Grail. The Sting. Brokeback Mountain, even. Sometimes it's a romantic comedy (not that he'll admit he watches them, mind.). His favourite movie is ever changing, depending on his mood, what he wants to watch, what he wants to feel. There's no one genre either, he appreciates a western as much as a horror film, as much as a romance. But, in general, he likes movies with happy endings. Unrealistic, maybe, but it's nice.

**He wishes his life was a movie. **If his life was a movie, he would get the girl in the end. He would finally outdo Sherlock at something. The Yard would cease to be a joke. People would respect him. He would beat all the odds and come out on top.

Most importantly, he'd have a happy ending.


	4. Part 4

_Huge thank you to HOS70 , Maddi Paige, Setep Ka Tawy, and especially Kaelir of Lorien for their lovely lovely reviews! 34 more things you may or may not know about Greg Lestrade. Sorry for gratuitous Avengers reference. Okay, no, I'm not really sorry. _****

He believes in heroes. 

**He loves kids. **Children are brilliant. He wants his own so badly he can feel it, a constant weight inside his chest. But for now he contends himself with watching, watching other people's children fly down the street on their bikes, play football in the park, walk home from school laughing and talking. There's kids everywhere in the city, and he smiles at them, at how happy they are. But he doesn't watch them for too long because people don't take kindly to weird middle-aged guys staring at their kids, even if you are a police officer. ****

He likes to hug people. He likes to hug, and he likes to be hugged. He's a physical presence, always punching lightly (or less lightly, depending on the recipient of the punch) on the arm as means of greeting, slapping people on the back, resting hands on shoulders, ruffling hair. He leans on people, guides people with a hand in the small of the back, pulls people closer to him with an arm round the shoulders or the hips. He likes to have that contact. He's had to learn to tone it down though, because Sherlock jumps four feet straight up in the air when anyone touches him when he's not expecting it, and Lestrade always feels guilty afterwards. "Would you stop being so touchy?" Dimmock complains when Lestrade starts laughing at a joke and ends up burying his face in Dimmock's shoulder to laugh. "You're always doing it. To everyone. People don't want their police officers groping them."

**He daydreams a lot. **A lot. He's surprised he gets anything done, surprised he made it through school, really. He's always off in his own little world, probably because it's nicer in there than the world around him. He spent his childhood staying after class to write "I will not daydream in class." on the board. He does it at work, staring out the window of his office for hours, slips into it during meetings, on the tube, even at crime scenes sometimes (which, in retrospect, is probably a bad thing.)

**The most hamburgers he's ever eaten in one sitting is eleven. **

**He gets scared. **Of small spaces, of death, of love, of giant killer monster hounds, of Sherlock relapsing into drugs. Of Sherlock dying. Of anything at all happening to Sherlock, really. Sherlock's a son to him, the son he didn't have, couldn't have, wanted to have, and there's so much out there that wants to get Sherlock that it makes him feel sick. He tells Sherlock he's not afraid of anything, and Sherlock – god knows why – believes him. But that was a lie, because he is scared, of so much, and of nothing more than losing Sherlock.

**His toaster always burns the toast on one side. **It drives him mad, because he hates burnt toast, and he hates that stupid toaster – a wedding present from someone on _her_ side that he doesn't even know – and he ought to just bin the whole thing, but then he'd have to go buy a whole new toaster, which really isn't worth the effort, and it's his last link to her, that goddamn appliance, and for some reason he doesn't want to toss it.

**He can whistle. **His grandad taught him when he was six, and he's never lost the touch. He can whistle songs – he gets every note of the scale on the right pitch – but it's rare he'll whistle when he can sing. So when he does whistle it's usually the two fingers in the mouth cab-hailing traffic-stopping attention-getting shriek. Usually reserved for trying to get his team's attention. He spent a whole summer practising to get that one right, and it wasn't in vain. He ends up using it a lot.

**He'll be eternally grateful for John Watson. **Specifically, what John did for Sherlock.

**In high school he kept his hair short and spiked it up with gel. **For a brief time he dyed it red, in a stroke of sudden madness. His last year of high school he grew it out long in a mullet. He cut it back short again when he went off to university, and he's had more or less the same hairstyle ever since.

**He was growing it out for Rebecca. **She said he'd look cute with long hair. So he binned the gel and let it grow out long. After she died, he was going to cut it off. It was too long, too heavy, it dripped rain down his back when it was wet. He walks home alone in the rain with his long hair plastered to his head and neck, the rain trickling inside the collar of his windbreaker. He stops at That Road, like he always does, the place where It happened, the car crash that took her away from him, and he looks for a long time until he sees headlights coming through the rain. And it's Emily. He says yes, he'd like a lift, and he gets in the car and she turns up the heat so that his hair starts to dry, and he says "drive" and she does. She doesn't ask questions. She doesn't try to make him feel better. She just drives. She asks him where to after awhile and he has her drive him to a haircutters – because he needs to get rid of this hair, and he needs to do it now – and she offers to wait around, and he says no, and he refuses money for the bus because he has his own in his book bag. "It's too bad." she says before she guns the engine and drives off into the rain. "I think it suits you."

He watches her car drive off over the crest of the hill, the glare of the taillights disappearing into the rain. And then he turns and looks back at the sign for the haircutters for awhile, and then he picks up his bag and walks down the road to the bus stop.

And all year, his hair stays long.

He cuts it off when he gets to the university where Emily's not and where Rebecca never will be.

**He can't touch his toes when he bends over. **Well, it's not _his_ fault he has long legs. But it is a tiny bit humiliating.

**He's given up on love. **He really has. It's not worth the risk. He's meant to be alone, and that's that, and that's all, and that's okay. Really, it's okay. It's fine.

**He still gets that thrill when he gets to turn on the sirens in the car. **

**He didn't always want to be a detective. **Well, that's a lie. He always did. It was just always behind rock god and actor on the list, and just slightly above astronaut, fireman, and race car driver.

**Wheelchairs make him nervous. **He gets all twitchy around them. And he has a good reason, having been in one for almost a month, but it's still embarrassing when one's brought in for evidence and he has to leave the room. Especially empty wheelchairs, he always feels they're watching him. They know he's cheated them out of an occupant and they want him back. Which is a completely ridiculous notion, of course, it sounds like a terrible low budget 3-in-the-morning horror flick – the wheelchair from hell, good god – but he can't shake it. And seeing people _in_ wheelchairs isn't any better. _That should be me._ He thinks, walking past. _That could be me, that should have been me, that would have been me...  
_

**He gets nightmares.** Not all the time, but enough. About wheelchairs. About being shot. About people he cares about being shot, being hurt, being killed. About terrible things he's seen. About people he killed. About people he couldn't save. Sometimes he still dreams about that car crash, thirty-one years later. He dreams about Sherlock, Sherlock hurt, relapsed, dying, dead. About it being his fault. Then he'll wake up in a mess of tangled sheets and sweat, alone in the house, his alarm clock flashing some obscure early – morning time. And he'll get up and walk, to make sure he can, and sometimes, if he's really worried, he calls Sherlock, or John, or Dimmock or Molly or Donovan or his ex-wife or whoever he's dreamed about, just to hear their voice and make sure they're still living. He always feels stupid for having done this – of course they're fine, it was just a dream – but it makes him feel better and he hangs up once they answer and goes back to sleep.

**He's terrible at cooking. **He could probably burn water. But he enjoys cooking all the same, even if it always ends in phoning for takeaway because the only thing he has to show for his work is a huge mess in the kitchen.

**He took piano lessons for five years. **He could actually play the piano beforehand, since he was six, but his first formal lesson was when he was nine. When he turned fifteen he gave it up to concentrate on guitar, but he could still play, and still can.

**He has a huge collection of CDs.**

He loves movies, but he rarely goes to the cinema. He buys or rents them when they're released on DVD and watches them at home. When he does go out to see a film, it's because he's been looking forward to it and he isn't patient enough to wait until the DVD comes out.

**He moves around a lot when he's sleeping. **He rolls around and stretches out and kicks and turns and takes up a whole lot of space. Add that to the list of things that maybe if he had changed he would still be with his wife.

**He's brilliant at checkers, but miserable at chess. **No one ever taught him to play chess, and so Sherlock tries, but Sherlock has the patience of a four-year-old and yells at him for being stupid when Lestrade can't get it right. He always forgets what all the little pieces do, and it takes too much time. Games take hours to complete, and half the game is sitting and waiting and strategizing, and it bores him. So he gives up, and he ends up teaching Sherlock to play checkers instead, and they play that. Sherlock beats him ten games in a row, gets bored, and leaves. But it was nice to have someone to play with while it lasted.

**Someone took his stapler off his desk and never gave it back. **He doesn't mind until he needs to staple something, and he goes around demanding it back, but no one ever fesses up to the crime. So he takes Donovan's stapler, and he's been using it ever since. She still doesn't know what's happened to it. Sharing at the Yard is a complicated barter system, and the line between "borrowed" and "stolen" really isn't a line at all. ****

He chews gum a lot. He spent his youth with chewing gum constantly in his mouth, and he picked it back up when he was trying to quit smoking. He tries the nicotine gum, but it tastes terrible, so he sticks to patches. Spearmint, original, or nothing. Gum is not meant to taste like fruits. He always has a pack in his desk, but it's always empty, because once word gets round everyone comes into his office to beg for a piece.

**When he was a teenager he made a chain of 240 gum wrappers. **And then his mum threw it out and decided he needed a summer job.

**His cell phone is too damn complicated. **He still doesn't know what all the functions on his cell phone do. He can text, and he can make calls, but he can't figure out the rest.

**He likes to try and find shapes in the clouds. **

**He meets a girl in a bar. **She has red hair, and she's charming and beautiful, so he buys her a round and they talk. At the end of the night she gives him her number and a wink and he feels like the happiest man alive. But he never calls. Because he's terrified. Terrified to ask for a date, not because he's afraid she'll reject him, but because he's afraid she'll accept. And then later leave him, break his heart. So he never calls and he wonders about her and if she even remembers the guy in that bar that night and if she even expected that call and if she ever found someone else. He's lost her number and he doesn't want it back. But he wonders.

**He loves to wear his sunglasses.**

**He hates the way Sherlock treats Molly. **

**He goes to see Avengers with Dimmock. **Four times. In the same day. They scream like excited twelve-year olds and clutch each other and laugh hysterically and argue over whether to buy separate popcorns and if the money saved is worth the risk of people thinking they're a gay couple. They're more excited than the throngs of ten year old boys filling the theatre, and they scream and cheer and laugh and cry and quote lines from the film all the way home and for days and days afterward. Lestrade wants shawarma after. He's not entirely sure what shawarma is, but he knows he wants one, except that Dimmock says no because he doesn't want people to think they're on a date. Lestrade says they are on a date, it's a man-date, and he laughs for two minutes straight because he's drunk on adrenaline and popcorn and four back-to-back showing of Avengers. Dimmock punches him in the gut and calls him an idiot.

Lestrade laughs harder.

**The next day they have shawarma together. **

**He'll always believe in heroes. **And Sherlock Holmes is one of them.


	5. Part 5

**He hates being alone. **It is ironic therefore that his entire life seems to be spent doing exactly that.

**Sherlock calls him "father" once. **It is a mistake, an errant slip of the tongue – Sherlock is talking too quickly and without thought, and when Lestrade interrupts him mid-stream the word comes out unconsciously. The second he realizes, Sherlock goes very quiet. He flushes, which means for Sherlock that his porcelain skin gains a more healthy shade of pink, and quickly excuses himself from the room while Lestrade locks himself in the toilets and cries in a very masculine way. Sherlock has always been his son, but to know that the feeling is reciprocated makes him immeasurably happy.

**He has never once taken a sick day when he has not been ill. **The occasional fake sick day is recognized and tolerated among the Yard, but Lestrade has never felt the need. He finds the notion ridiculous. Work is what he does all day. Without his work he is nothing.

**He has taken exactly three sick days when he has been ill. **On one of these occasions he had been physically unable to get himself out of bed. The other two he had shown up to work anyways and been promptly sent home. He remembers each in great detail. Usually, when he is sick, he will go to work anyways because work does not wait for you to be ready and lying around in bed all day in an empty house is really inconvenient, not to mention depressing. This is to the great annoyance of his co-workers who would then be exposed to the ever present threat of a) catching whatever Lestrade has picked up themselves or b) finding him dead at his desk one day because the severity of the illness is irrelevant to him : If he can get to work, he will.

**Sherlock taught him how to waltz. **They are in Lestrade's living room at one in the afternoon on a day when there have been no murders. He is surprisingly patient, much more so than during his attempt to teach Lestrade how to play chess. A few years later he will teach the same to John Watson.

**He witnessed Sherlock overdose on cocaine three times. **And every time feels like dying inside.

**As a teenager he was a completely different person. **Greg Lestrade was wild and free and outspoken. He tried new things, he was creative and artistic and popular, and most of all, happy. People change, he supposes. Lives and minds and hearts change because the world around them changes and they have to keep up.

**He bought Sherlock that blue scarf. **Sherlock alternated, in the time before his detox, between living in a disgusting hole of a flat in the slums of London and living out on the streets. As dank and revolting as his flat was, you always hoped to find him there, because Sherlock sleeping on the streets meant he could no longer afford his rent, which meant, of course, that Sherlock had spent all his money on cocaine. This is how he finds Sherlock that night, literally sleeping in a gutter, his cheek pressed against the cold metal, his long curls spread out on the road. Sherlock grows his hair long, Lestrade will be informed later, because it keeps his neck warm on those nights he spends on the street. Lestrade cuts his hair and buys him a scarf instead.

**He'll never forget the moment he tied that scarf around Sherlock's neck. **Because Sherlock had looked up at him in that moment with bright blue eyes and smiled. His genuine smiles are rare, and Lestrade can count on one hand the number of times Sherlock has smiled at him and meant it. He will always treasure that first one. The scarf was expensive. The smile was priceless.

**Mycroft forbade him from visiting Sherlock during the detox. **He came anyways, and Mycroft did not ask him to leave.

**He loves those rare days in London where it is really truly hot. **Sometimes in the summer the rain will clear and the sun will rise early and set late, and in the afternoons people go sleeveless and shirtless and pile their drinks with ice. Kids come out to play in the sun, lathered in sunscreen, and teenagers lie around in packs in the shade. He walks down the street, feeling the warmth on his hair and sweating just a little at the collar and he'll smile.

**He takes his coffee black. **Most of the time. He enjoys the bitter taste and the way it instantly energizes him. But sometimes he will heap it with sugar, when he has nothing to do and no one is there to make fun of him, and that tastes very good to him.

**There was a time in his life when he wanted to act. **It was an impossible dream then, and even more so now, but a younger Greg Lestrade had no trouble with dreaming impossible dreams. He did not dream of acting in films, which he adored, but on the stage, real acting, true acting, raw and gritty and in-the-moment. When you film movies you can depend on such things as takes and lighting and directing to carry your performance, but on stage there is nothing but you and your lines to make the audience believe. He does two-and-a-half school musicals and a small part in an original play by an amateur director, and this is the extent of his career. People change and dreams change.

**He craves routine. **

Some people call it boring, mundane. He calls it comfortable.

**Much of his rivalry with Gregson stems from the fact that Gregson has everything Lestrade wants to have. **He is married, and happily, with a grown child in a good university, who's list of accomplishments is long enough that Gregson is never short of bragging material. He is Lestrade's age almost exactly, being born a month ahead of him, but his hair has not yet lost any of it's golden – blonde and he is athletic and clever and does exciting things with his time off and all of this Lestrade is quite bitter about, which is an extremely childish way to be, but it is hard to stop.

**He loves croissants. **They are rich and flaky and buttery and sinful and he can eat them for hours on end (but does not, of course, because they are also extremely fattening.)

**He has good dreams too. **He dreams a lot – maybe more than normal, but maybe not, he does not know how many dreams the average person has or where he fits on that scale. But it seems to him a great amount. It is hard to remember them when he wakes, but he will remember having them, and if he thinks hard he will remember flashes of colour and blurred faces. He thinks he must dream about Sherlock a lot, but he is not sure. One night he dreams that he has children, two, a boy and a girl, and when he wakes to an empty house he does not understand why he cannot stop crying.

**If it weren't that Sherlock was doing it with him, he would have given up on quitting smoking by now. **

**He used to sit on rooftops with Sherlock. **They would find a public building that was neither too short or too tall, and that permitted the general public to sit on the roof and dangle their feet over the edge. Often it was St. Bart's hospital, which had a flat roof with a little ledge for sitting. They would sit here and smoke, days when they had not yet quit, at times when there had been no crimes and the traffic was slow and the sun was not quite full. These days the only noise would be the occasional bird or rustle of wind because they did not talk. They did not have to. Rare moments of peace and silence were treasured, and without words.

**He wishes he had kept in touch with more of his old friends. **

**He does not like Father's day. **It is just a holiday invented to sell more greeting cards. He does not understand why it hurts so badly.

**His favourite flowers are yellow. **He does not know the names of all the species of flower, and never will, but yellow flowers, of any shape size or form, are his favourite.

**He is not very fond of vomiting. **He hates being sick. He hates the feeling before, during and after. He hates the sound of it, and the smell. He hates to see other people doing it, as well, yet somehow he's usually the one holding people's heads over the toilet. He doesn't remember applying for that position.

**He loves his Ipod. **A Christmas gift from himself, to himself. It's named Greg's Ipod and it has a little plastic blue cover and though it took him ages and ages to learn how to use it he's rarely without it. Music is a lovely thing to carry round in your pocket. Listening to it takes the place of being alone with his thoughts, which is a definite plus.

**He fiddles a lot. **He used to twirl his wedding ring round and round when his hands were idle. Sometimes he still reaches for it, only to find it is not there. It still hurts, no matter how many times he does it.

**He is not afraid of Mycroft Holmes. **And it's funny to see how much this disturbs the man.

**He has very faint scars across the pads of his fingertips. **These are from guitar strings.

**He knows that John Watson shot that cabbie. **But John makes Sherlock happy, so he'll never tell.

**He tans very easily.** He cannot, however, reach all the way to his back when he's putting sunscreen on so he always gets burnt across his back and shoulders.

**Caroline Baker. **They met when she was four and he was six. She was his first and his closest friend, and they had planned to be married one day. She had dark brown hair that she always wore in two braids and that is all he remembers of her now. There are other memories, of course, long summer afternoons finding shapes in clouds, climbing trees, running through grass, games of football and tree forts and picking flowers by the road. But her face is a blur in his mind. She moved away when he was ten. He wonders sometimes if she ever married.

**He doesn't know how to use the coffeemaker at the Yard. **It's really complicated, and he's pretty sure it hates him. He drinks a lot of tea at work.

**He will do anything for Sherlock. **Anything at all, without question, without thought for consequence to himself. He thinks perhaps this is what it is like to be a father.


	6. Part 6

**He has sworn to himself that he will protect Sherlock above everything, no matter the cost. **Because this is what police officers and fathers are for, to protect.

**He loves the snow. **When he was younger he always hoped for wet snow – packing snow, for snow forts and for snowmen and for snowball fights. Now his favourite is the light fluffy stuff, utterly useless in your hands, but which settles in your eyelashes and hair and the ground around you and makes it beautiful.

**He loses sight of Sherlock once at a crime scene. **He remembers turning this way and that, trying to catch a glimpse of curly hair and high cheekbones among the crowds of people only a few seconds before the building where he'd last known the detective to be collapses. He remembers staring, remembers the very very cold feeling in his chest like his heart had been turned to ice, remembers the dread and the fear and that pain just beginning to rise when Sherlock comes up beside him and declares "that was tedious."

He also remembers Sherlock wriggling like a fish as he crushes the scrawny detective against his side in a hug and scolding, a bit sharper than he'd meant to: "Don't you _ever_ do that to me again." And because he remembers all this he will never let Sherlock out of his sight at a crime scene from that day forward.

**He's not really fond of change. **It's nice to have some things you can count on to always stay the same.

**He really sucks at martial arts. **"Teach me that thing you do." he says to Sherlock. "The kung-fu thing where you flip people over your head." Sherlock looks bored. "Are you referring to jiu-jitsu, or bartitsu? I know both. And neither of them are about 'flipping people over your head' as you so crudely assumed." Lestrade stands up. "Yeah, whatever. Come on. Show me how you do it."

In the next second Sherlock has grabbed Lestrade, who easily outweighs him, and thrown him hard into the coffee table, which cracks down the middle. One week later, the detective has broken four coffee tables with Lestrade's head, and Lestrade gives up.

**The first time Mycroft attempts to kidnap him he refuses to get into the car. **It is the night after he first met Sherlock. He proceeds to beat up the driver and the two men in suits who try to force him into the vehicle until a third cracks him over the head with something very hard. He wakes up tied to a chair. He will attempt to explain to Mycroft many times over the next few years that a text message saying "Hi, I'm Sherlock's brother, can we talk?" would have been much more effective, but Mycroft simply refuses to listen.

**He believes very firmly that people are inherently good. **He believes that deep in the subconcious there is a desire for morality, for goodness. And yet sometimes he sees what the world in which he lives has done to Sherlock Holmes, and he begins to hate the world and doubt the good.

**He owns his own car, but he likes to walk. **Walking is cheap, and it is often quicker. He walks to work and home again when the weather is nice. He likes the feel of pavement underfoot, air in his lungs. Maybe he just likes the fact that he can walk, period. You do not realize how precious walking is. Children learn to walk, and promptly forget. It is autopilot, transport only. But when you have lost that ability, then you realize how extraordinarily complex it is, to take step after step and walk. He re-learned walking, and it was hard. He does not take that for granted.

**He likes to people-watch. **He loves sitting down by the side of the road, in a food court, in a park, and just watching people go by. Sherlock would know from one glance the state of their marriage, their age, weight, job, pets, address, brand of car, but these are not things Lestrade looks for. He watches children playing, lovers strolling, teenagers laughing. He likes to guess at their lives, at what makes them so happy.

**He wishes that Sherlock would not treat the Yard as a joke. **

**He loves driving late at night, when the city is dark and the roads are quiet. **London is not known for it's night life. The air will be quiet and calm. He will open his windows and the only noise will be the wind, the car tires ghosting along the empty roads, and he loves this feeling.

**He spends more time at his desk than he does at his house. **And he likes it that way.

**His knees are very scarred. **Scrapes and bumps and bruises, scabbing and scars has left the skin permanently marked. He has fallen down stairs, tumbled off bikes, scaled fences, tripped on the road. Somehow his knees have always taken the worst of the wear. It does not bother him. He likes scars. They tell stories.

**He was fourteen years old when he went on his first date. **He does not remember that date above others, except that he had brought her a white lily. When he sees these flowers he will still think of her.

**He was rarely bullied in school. **It is much to say "never", he imagines everyone has faced some sort of torment in their life, however small. But he had many friends in school, he got along with everyone, and it was rare that someone saw it to tease or to hurt him. It was often his friends who were targeted. His father had taught him from an early age how to deal with such things – two quick punches to the head, one after the other. No one messed with Greg Lestrade and his friends. He wishes Sherlock had had a father to teach him the old one two.

**He hates how Sherlock treats Donovan, and he hates how Donovan treats Sherlock. **

**He tends to save his money, rather than spend it. **He has everything he needs. He is not one to spend on whim. But he has no idea what he is saving it for.

**Sometimes music makes him cry. **He loves music, and he always has. He is very deeply attached to melody and lyric, and it is therefore easy for them to inspire emotion in him. Often it will be the memory associated with the music, such as listening to a soundtrack from a favourite show, or a song that had been playing when he had undergone something frightening or dramatic. But Lestrade knows and cares enough about music that some music hits him right in the chest just in the performance and the sound, and Sherlock's violin is one of these.

**He keeps memories under his bed.** He is not an overly messy person, but nor is he tidy, and the underside of his bed is cluttered with all sorts of rubbish. He has a bin of high school yearbooks, old test papers, things like that. He has a small wooden box, that for many years had been hidden under a rock in his childhood backyard, filled with the treasures of children – bottle caps, cork, string, coins, toys, a faded detective novel. Most treasured of this mess under his bed, however is the photo albums. He has many of those, and he does not look at them often. The memories are most often happy ones. They are out of place in his life now.

**He believes in gay marriage. **The important bit is marrying someone you love. He doesn't see why gender is such an issue.

**Lifts make him a little bit nervous. **Especially ones that go up really high. He's not scared so much as he is aware of them. Aware of the fact that no matter how nice the carpeting is and even if you hang a chandelier in the middle it's still a tiny little metal box hung from a few cables. You could plummet to your death at any second. But it's not that that worries him so much as being stuck between floors. There's not that much air in those things, you know.

**Loud music is the best music. **Crank the volume control. Blast the guitar solo. He likes when the music swells and fills up the whole room, the whole house, the world world. When all you can hear is music.

**He sleeps with his gun on his nightstand. **

**He believes completely and utterly in duct tape. **That stuff can do anything.

**He likes to read. **Film and television are by far his favourite means of passing the time – not counting crime scenes, because that's not entertainment, shouldn't be, not unless you're Sherlock, and even then it's not really decent - but although his DVD shelves are far more full than his bookshelves he still enjoys it. He likes printed word. He likes making your own film in your head when you're reading. He likes the feel of turning pages. No e-books, thanks. Call him old-fashioned, but he wants it in his hands.

**When he is stressed he pulls at his hair. **Sometimes he snaps off the ends, sometimes he pulls it out in clumps. It annoys him to no end when he catches himself doing it. He's already grey. He doesn't want to be bald as well.

**He knows that Sally can do a lot better than Anderson. **That she knows this too and doesn't care drives him crazy.

**He's not overly fussed with politics. **He has his opinions, of course, and he votes, but he does not go out of his way to voice them. He will make polite conversation about such matters, but what really concerns him in his life is his job, and the law, and Sherlock. Not in that order, either.

**He loves to watch stars. **He's no astronomer. He has no telescope, not even a working knowledge of stars and their movement through the sky. But he can identify most constellations, and he knows which are stars, which are planets, and which are passing aircraft. It relaxes him. It fascinates him. The night sky is a beautiful thing.

**He does not like crap telly. **He likes television that makes him think, or at least is well shot, well written, well executed. He will watch it, of course, when nothing else is on, but he does not enjoy it and he does not go out of his way to watch what he does not enjoy. He is not one to turn on mindless crap to take his mind off problems. When he has problems, which is often, he wants to immerse himself in other people's problems. He wants to think.

**The most beautiful thing he has ever seen is Sherlock's smile. **

**He does not like weird food. **No, he will not eat seaweed. That is for fish. If it is not properly cooked, fry it until it is. If he cannot pronounce the name, it goes in the bin. If it is an animal he has never heard of, it goes in the bin. If he is not sure that it is even an animal, it goes in the bin. If it is from a country he has never heard of, it goes in the bin. Give him good old-fashioned British cooking. Please.

**He wonders sometimes if he should buy a pet. **Maybe it would be less lonely.

**When he really needs to unwind, he lays down on his bed and listens to music. **On days when he does not wish to escape, just to relax, he does not busy himself with movies. He will lie down in the spare bedroom with his ipod and just close his eyes and listen.

**Sometimes he will feel suddenly very sad, and he does not know why. **

**When he was a child, he always wanted red hair. **Red hair is a magical thing. Rare. When sunlight hits brown hair it looks red. When sunlight hits red hair it looks like a world on fire. He lived his childhood in constant envy of those select few.

**He was six years old when he learned how to ride a bicycle. **He was eighteen when he learned how to ride a motorbike.

**Sometimes he is jealous of Mycroft. **How easy it must be, to live without emotion. To shut yourself off like that. To build up walls around your heart. How lovely, how safe, it must be, inside that ice fortress.

**He is very ticklish. **

**He is good with words. **He always knows what to say, to crying widows at crime scenes, to angry superiors on the phone, to arrogant consulting detectives. It is a skill that he hardly notices, but is greatly admired by his co-workers. They do not admit this of course, but continue instead to tease him about his inability to use the coffeemaker.

**He likes to drive fast. **Very fast. This is illegal, of course, so he does not, and there is no space to in London anyways. But he dreams of flying down roads with the wind in his hair, old country roads with no one around, the world blurring around him. Maybe this is why he liked the motorcycle. The feel of flying. Flying away.

**He wishes that love was like they show it in films. **But the truth is that love is scary and painful and hard and confusing. He wants sun and ice cream dates and flowers and kissing in the rain. He wishes that real love, that real life, was a bit less real.

**If he were to gain a very large sum of money, by inheritance, lottery, or whatever else - he has absolutely no idea what he would do with it. **

**He knows the names of the children he never had. **If he had a girl, he would name her Jenny. A boy would be William, but he would be called Bill or Will or something, because William sounds a bit too posh. If he had another girl, he would name her something with an A in the back, like Rebecca or Amelia or Julia. Another boy would be James. He had considered Greg, but that would be confusing. He only planned on one of each, anyways. And then maybe a third. That had always been his plan, two-or-three kids. He had decided on names back in high school.

Funny how things work out.

**When he was six he stole a pack of gum from the corner store. **He smuggled it out in his pocket, his accomplice his best friend Caroline. There was a thrill, being bad. But they felt guilty enough that later they came back and paid the man there in full.

**He hates to see the way Molly looks at Sherlock. **He knows that look too well. And he knows that Sherlock will never see it.

**He feels sometimes that he has gone very far and accomplished nothing to show for it. **

**There have been a few times in his life where he had been convinced he was going to die. **In each of these situations, he had found himself thinking of Sherlock.

**The trait he most admires in someone is courage. **

**When he was young, his father taught him how to fall. **He spent his childhood climbing trees. Falling was imminent and inescapable – what goes up must come down, and often a misstep off a branch means he falls. Falling is human, unavoidable, easy. But to fall in such a way that you can promptly pick yourself up, escaping too much injury – this is a skill. It was his dad who taught him how to tuck in his knees, to welcome gravity, not to fight it, to hit the ground on his back or side and not with his ankles. He learned to climb on his own. His dad taught him how to fall.

**He felt very lost in the world until he met Sherlock. **


	7. Part 7

_I would like to thank all of you for the tremendous support you have given this fic! If you reviewed, followed, or favourited, let me extend the warmest virtual hug in your direction!_

_Thank you so much sakura rakuen, Jfreak, Catindahat, Maddi Paige, the ticking clock, lightswentoutingeorgia91, Guest (whoever you are.), Tegan Ganmore, ravenoak21, Flower in the River, irishphoenix89 , Pinefresh65, lysemma, nachalainne, CountryGrl, Setep Ka Tawy (you are fantastic!), and especially to Kuronoko Tsubame! _

_Thanks also to all the lovely people I did not mention by name but who used their valuable time to review. I am so sorry I did not include you, if you are missing from my list, but let me tell you that I appreciate you more than words can ever say! You lot are beautiful people. Drop me a PM if you like when you notice you reviewed and I did not thank you and I'll express my gratitude in the next chapter. _

_Special thanks to Haelia! If people have not yet read her amazing fic __**Before Watson **__based on my headcanons here, please please do, it is astounding. Haelia, thanks for loving Lestrade with me. I hope you update Before Watson soon! Hint! _

_Without further bla bla from me: 45 More things you may or may not have know about Lestrade. _

* * *

**He wishes sometimes he could hunt down every person who ever hurt Sherlock and make them suffer.**

**He's prone to headaches and migraines. **He is relatively sure that these are caused by Sherlock.

**Joseph Michael Keates.** Jimmy Keates to his friends, of course, and Lestrade was his closest. Inseparable from the age of eight. Lestrade had had dozens of friends in his youth, many different circles of them, but Jimmy was on the innermost circle and he will remember him always the best. Jimmy was solid. Steady. Kind and clever and a bit on the shorter side. He sees him in John Watson sometimes. Jimmy would help him with his math when no one else could, calm him down when he was angry, stand by him when he was sad. They lose touch after graduation, having promised they would see each other again. One day he will enlist Sherlock's help in finding Joseph Michael Keates only to find that he was killed in action a few years earlier. Iraq. Not Afganhistan.

He does not think it possible sometimes for the world to weigh any heavier upon him, but time and time again the world proves him wrong.

**He thinks sometimes of taking down his guitar and playing. **But still he does not.

**He loves to go to the beach. **Any beach. Any bay. Anywhere with sand and water. He does not like secluded areas, hidden places. He does not wish to be alone. He goes to beaches that are crowded and busy, and he watches the teenagers laughing in the waves and the kids playing in the sand and the lovers walking along hand in hand and does not have to wonder things like where his own life has gone because the air is too busy and too noisy to leave him alone with his thoughts, and this is how he likes it.

**He's a bit of a romantic at heart. **

**The first time he was called a hero was when he was very young. **He had stopped some other kid from throwing rocks at his neighbour's cat. She declares him a hero and invites him inside for biscuits and tea. He remembers still the swell of pride.

**He is an extrovert. **He likes people. He does not wish to keep to himself, to be left alone. And yet it seems that people always leave him.

**When he dies, Sherlock can have everything. **God knows what he's going to do with all those DVDs and comic books, but they're there if he wants them.

**Someone calls Sherlock a freak the very first time Greg brings him to a crime scene.** Greg screams at them for nearly ten minutes before having realized that he has opened his mouth at all, that it is his own voice echoing around the place. Sherlock is much more than that. He swears and threatens and the officer who had insulted Sherlock bows his head and leaves. The hurt in Sherlock's eyes changes from hurt to surprise to awe. It makes Greg wonder if anyone's ever stuck up for the poor kid before.

**He sings while he is getting dressed, making dinner, cleaning the house. **He loves to sing. And it makes it all seem less lonely.

**He is named after a great-grandfather that he has never met. **

**His parents divorced a few years after he had left school. **It did not affect his life greatly, nor theirs. They made a mutual decision that they were no longer in love, and still remain on good terms. He wishes his own divorce had been so neat.

**He still gets horrible cravings. **Quitting is not easy. Quitting is very very very hard. And it just gets harder.

**He still refuses to get in the car. **If Mycroft wants him so badly, Mycroft is expected to leave him a polite text from his own proper phone asking for him. And not at ridiculous hours of the night and day, either.

**He's always friendly to the rookies. **Hey, he was one of them once.

**He has so many questions he wants to ask Sherlock.** But those are personal things, and if Sherlock does not want to share, it is not Lestrade's place to pry.

**He has been thrown out of the Diogenes club exactly eight times for talking. **Seven of those may or may not have been on purpose. But honestly, who's idea was that? What is the point of sitting in silence? Why can't he talk to people? He likes to talk to people! If this is the stuff super geniuses get off on, he's not so sure he wants to be one. Seems lonely. Not that he could get any lonelier.

**Dimmock insists regularly that he should try to meet girls. **Lestrade has never heard of anything scarier.

**Once, for fun, he changed his phone number to see if Mycroft could still find him. **It took him less than ten seconds to get a text on his new number.

**He is quite comfortable with his body. **There are times, however, usually after gaining weight, that he is prone to sudden insecurity.

**He worries about Sherlock. Always. **Every time that the detective disappears around a corner, chasing after a criminal – an armed criminal, naturally, or where would be the fun? - with his great coat flapping behind him, Greg worries. Every time he loses sight of him during a chase, he worries. Every time Sherlock goes off on his own, he worries. He has to let Sherlock go, give him room. But it is hard. And he is very afraid because he can think of nothing worse than losing Sherlock.

**It still shocks and hurts him sometimes, what some human beings can do to others. **

**He asks Sherlock about his father once. **It is in a passing query, an errant comment, light and utterly insensitive. "My father died when I was six." Sherlock will reply. Lestrade's heart physically hurts. Boys like Sherlock needs fathers. He apologies over and over. Sherlock looks confused. "Did you kill him?" Lestrade is taken aback. "No!" Sherlock's frown deepens. "Then why apologize?" He is annoyed with the fuss Lestrade makes, the obvious pain in his eyes. "All lives end." he says haughtily, and stalks away. Lestrade cannot imagine growing up without a father.

**He hates when people dismiss films as "It's only a movie." **Movies are more than that.

**He likes game shows. **He screams out the answers at the television and cheers when he wins non-existent money and calls the contestants colourful names when they cannot get the answer right. Sherlock will watch with him and nod when Greg calls the people idiots and ask if Greg noticed that wedding ring on a chain round her neck or the state of her nail polish. Sherlock hates scripted shows, dramas, where no one thinks to braid a character's hair a certain way or leave a tell-tale piece of jewelry on her finger. But game shows have real people, and real things to deduce, and Sherlock keeps up a constant monologue of how _maybe she could have studied more if she hadn't been sleeping with her husband's brother and maybe she wouldn't be losing ten thousand pounds right now_.

**He's not very close with his extended family. **He knows people with nieces and nephews and third cousins-twice-removed. He has none of this.

**His grandfather died when he was six. **He remembers sitting on the step of the porch outside his childhood home during the wake while the adults inside cried and talked and drank wine. They were very close, Greg and his grandfather, but he does not cry. Caroline had come out of the house to sit with him, and they were silent together for some time, watching stars from the porch. The night was clear and quiet. This is one of his earliest memories, and he remembers it still in great detail. He remembers breeze ruffling long grass, and insects chirping in the night and he sits there with his best friend and the first taste of death in his life. He remembers her telling him that when people die their souls go up into the sky and become stars, and he remembers pointing out the star that was surely his grandfather from the pitch black sky and he remembers these things sometimes standing over dead bodies at night at crime scenes and looking up at the sky.

**He hates sometimes how flippantly Sherlock treats death. **Human life is a very very precious thing. All human life. To lose even one is a horrible thing.

**He and his wife had always been at odds over Christmas. **Greg wanted a huge tree. Snowglobes and tinsel and wreaths and holly and mistletoe and garlands and bows. His wife saw it as too much money, too much work, for one day of the year. They had, after all, no children to share it with. A tree and a few nice pine wreaths for the doors, she said. That would be enough. But it was important to Greg, who adores the holiday season, and they spend exorbitant amounts of money on decoration. He has not put up a Christmas tree for a few years now. There is no need anymore. He is alone in the house.

**The first Christmas that he knows Sherlock, he buys the detective a gift. **Sherlock looks as though he expects the brightly wrapped package to be a bomb. "You bought me a present?" he asks, looking absolutely baffled. Lestrade assures him that yes, he did, of course, it's Christmas, and pleads with him to open it. He's excited. He's always wanted kids to buy Christmas presents for. Well, he's always wanted kids, period, but that didn't really work out. But he's not sad right now. Not this Christmas. He remembers Sherlock fingering the ribbon on the package. "I didn't get you anything." he had said. Lestrade had then crushed the scrawny detective against him in a hug. "Yes you did."

**He tends to be a very forgiving person. **He rarely, if ever, seeks any kind of vengeance on those who have wronged him. Those who have hurt Sherlock, however, is a different story.

**He enjoyed school. **Not the schoolwork itself, though that was rarely a problem for him. He never remembers dreading going to class. School, be it high school or primary school, was a place to see his friends, to make new friends, to learn new things. He complained like anyone else, but he was always excited for it.

**He can beat Gregson at arm wrestling. **About this, he is immeasurably pleased.

**He lost his virginity in his second year of university. **

**He adores scary movies. **Even though they scare them half to death. Sherlock says "boring." John finds them fake and disinteresting. His wife, being scared of them, had detested the genre. But Greg loves to be scared. He screams at all the parts you're supposed to, buries his face in his hands and then watches through his fingers. He's always able to lose himself in the film. The next day he jumps at every noise. But he delights in it.

**He is immeasurably proud of Sherlock Holmes. **

**He does not believe you can only love once. **Love is a complicated thing that he does not fully understand. But he does not think it is limited to one person. You can love, and love again. Sometimes, though, seeing Sherlock and John together, he contemplates the existence of soul mates. Perfect matches. Not just romantically, but rather two people who were destined as friends. He tries not to waste time on fanciful notions of this sort, but the way in which the pair of them fit together is too absolute to be pure coincidence. He has to wonder if Sherlock and John were meant for each other, and if so, why whoever is out there for him seems to be rather late to the party.

**Mary Jane Watson over Gwen Stacy. **

**He's a peace-maker. **He tries to avoid conflict when he can, (though he is by no means impervious) and when it does arise he will always try to settle it.

**Sometimes when he goes running in the mornings, he will go by Bart's to see John. **He likes to run. Well, rather it is not so much that he likes it as that he needs to. Needs to run. It clears his head. It distracts from his pain. He is prone, sometimes, to sudden and terrible bouts of sadness and rather than deal with this he gets to his feet and runs away from it. He will run and run until the pain in his muscles and his lungs is greater than the pain of his heart and he will feel better. Lestrade does not jog. Lestrade sprints. He runs as fast as he possibly can for as long as he possibly can until his lungs - thank you, 30-something years of nicotine - are screaming in protest and he feels like throwing up and his legs cannot hold him anymore. This is good pain. It distracts from the rest. John will see him from his office window and sometimes come down and toss him a water bottle and they will sit on the curb for a bit and talk. John is a good man, a good friend. Other times, still, he will run to 221B and collapse on the steps, watching the traffic. Sometimes Sherlock comes out to scoff at him. Other times, not. But it never ceases to make him feel just the slightest bit better.

**He hates doing press conferences. **

**He calculated once, that he gets an average of 68 texts from Sherlock a day. **Most consist of the words "bored" "Lestrade" and "Need Case." He will check every single one, just in case, but it is rare he replies once he gets more than 20. The amount increases when they are working on a case together, in which he gets orders like "if body has puncture marks, leave immediately" "find statue of Paul McCartney" or "If brother has green ladder, arrest brother." Sometimes he gets texts like "NEED CIGARETTE" and he will promptly reply "No." and leave to check up on the detective. Sometimes he gets nonsensical ones like "Mycroft is fat" and, his favourites: "Come here. I have a case." He and Sherlock spend less and less time on cases together, and though Lestrade should be thrilled that Sherlock has John and that he has more time to spend on work, he is still the slightest bit jealous.

**The first words Sherlock ever spoke to him were "Your father lives in Dorset." **He remembers the confusion. How could this young man living (not "living" he is later assured – it is a temporary state of residence) in an underpass tunnel without shoes or coat know such a thing from only the jacket Greg had put round his shoulders? Sherlock will go on to tell him his whole life story from that jacket. But he will always remember those first words.

**Sometimes he looks at Sherlock and has an insatiable urge to scoop Sherlock up in his arms like a child and carry him away from all the pain in the world, the cocaine and the dark and the hurt and take him somewhere safe. **But no such place exists, and the world is a cruel place full of cocaine and dark and hurt and Lestrade can only stand in front of Sherlock and pray that the world will take him first.


	8. Part 8

_Thank you so much to everyone who reviewed, added to story alert, or favourited this story! _

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**He takes after his father in looks. **

**Sherlock wrote him a song on the violin once. **

**Since meeting Sherlock, the world is different. **There are little things, hidden. Everywhere, there are worlds and worlds beneath the surface of what he sees. He discovers that he knows little to nothing about London – that it is a city of little things, hidden things, dark things, places that he would never have thought to see in all of his life. There can be crime in the midst of the most commonplace of objects, there are clues in rusted nails and tended bushes, there are stories in coat sleeves and bootlaces and earrings. The world is an incredible place through Sherlock's eyes. He looks for hidden things now, and though Sherlock alone can see them, he knows they are there.

**He would never give up his job for anything, and he hopes to work for Scotland Yard for the rest of his life. **

**Sometimes he gets freckles in the sun. **

**There are days he looks at Sherlock, and he can no longer see the hollow addict he once was. **And these are days he goes home happier than he remembers being in a long time.

**He's very ticklish.**

**He takes long showers. **He sings in the shower. All of one song, then two, three, four. He stands and he thinks, and he lets the warm water soak him through. It washes off the pain sometimes. He takes morning showers and he thinks about things he could do, should do, maybe one day will be brave enough to do with his day. The noise of the water drowns out the silence of his house. Sometimes he shuts his eyes and he pretends that his wife will be banging on the bathroom door yelling about the water bill and_ the kids have to get ready for school hurry up_ and _what are you doing in there anyways we're going to be late_ and _don't you have to be at work in ten minutes_ and that he will shut off the water and get out of the shower and kiss her as apology for the water bill and the children he doesn't have will complain and he will kiss them each goodbye and say _I love you have a good day at school_.

A few minutes later he will get out of the shower and there will be no one to kiss goodbye as he leaves for work.

**There are still bloodstains on the strings and the frets of his guitar. **He had played it until his fingers bled, and he had stopped abruptly and not bothered to change or to clean the strings.

**It seems to many that Sherlock never gets ill, but Lestrade knows that is not true. **He does seem untouchable yes, and the common afflictions that the general population has to put up with seem to bounce off that coat of his, but there is a cold here, a fever there, a case of pneumonia, or a particularly nasty stomach flu. They are rare, and Sherlock keeps them to himself, so it is not until Lestrade turns up at his flat to find him throwing up all over the bathroom does he find out. On these cases he will stay with Sherlock, and he will nurse him and coddle him and do all the things Sherlock hates but is too weak to complain about. Often, as in the case of the stomach flu, he is rewarded by catching the illness himself. But it will always be worth it.

**His favourite pair of jeans are light blue. **He has had them for many years and they are faded and worn, but still they fit comfortably and he wears them three, four, five, seven days in a row.

**He loves the smell of new books. **

**He loves the smell of old books. **

**He calls Mycroft every Christmas. **He knows the man spends it alone and he knows how lonely that must be. Every year Mycroft fusses at him for tying up his phone line and_ I did not give you this __number for social calls, Gregory_ and _Yes, Gregory, I can see that it is snowing_ and _Gregory I am expecting a very important call from the ambassador of Canada if this is not about my brother I will hang up_. Christmas phone calls between them last an average of forty-five seconds. But he will still call every year.

**He beats Sherlock at Cluedo every time. **It infuriates the detective to no end, but it makes Lestrade feel proud.

**He feels old sometimes and he hates it.**

**It was raining on the night he met Sherlock. **Not fat raindrops, but drizzle, a barely-there mist that coated your skin and left you shivering to the core. The night was very cold, and the rain did not help. There was wind, and where there was lights in the underpass tunnel he could see it slanting through the air, little lines of raindrop, like shooting stars. It is strange, the little things you remember.

**He's a registered organ donor. **

**Sherlock fell asleep on him once. **It was one of those days he had 'abducted' (Sherlock's words, not his own) the detective from his 'experiment' (something to do with houseflies in a jar) and dragged him down into the basement of his place to watch a DVD. Sherlock is draped all over Greg and the couch, long arms and coat and 90% legs – but Greg is too wrapped up in the film to notice. For that reason he is not quite sure when Sherlock falls asleep, only that suddenly the warm weight of his head is resting against Greg's chest and his normally tense muscles are relaxed and his breathing is even and Greg sits for a long time marvelling at this – Sherlock, asleep. He does not know when he himself falls asleep, only that when he wakes it is very late and the DVD is whirring loudly in the player and Sherlock's warmth is gone.

**No, he does not have facebook. **

**He sees Rebecca's photograph in the newspaper about ten years after her death. **It is some new campaign about impaired driving and maybe it is a good thing but it makes his chest hurt and his fingers tremble and he throws the paper out before he can linger over the photo too long.

**He took that photograph. **It was the one they ran with her obituary, the one they put up at her funeral. It is the photograph of her that he had had in his locker at school. She is smiling at the camera and there is a clear blue sky behind her and it makes her blue eyes very blue. Her hair is long in the photo, dark brown and straight and shiny. She is smiling happily, a smile full of life. They were outside at lunch and Greg had had his camera and they had laughed and kissed and taken pictures because the day had been beautiful and they had been thrilled with the weather and the sun and the world in general, love and youth and life. He printed two copies, one for him and one for her, and her parents one day would use her copy to run a photo in the newspaper beside the story of how she died, and they would run it again in the back with her obituary. He does not know what happened to his copy. He is glad.

**He had horrible posture as a kid. **Always slumping, leaning, slouching. Eventually, he trained it out of himself.

**He's started to consider maybe asking Molly out for a coffee sometime. **She looks so sad sometimes, not in front of Sherlock, never, but sometimes he sees it and he knows what it is like to be sad. But always he hesitates, and he never does.

**Sometimes, when he comes home angry, or very sad, he reaches for his guitar. **But then he hesitates, and he does not play, and he leaves the guitar hanging on the wall, a relic of the past, a memory. He runs instead. When he runs until he throws up he feels better, and it is like playing the guitar but without the memories and it hurts in a good way.

**Despite the amount of running he does, both for his job and in his spare time, he is not a good runner. **He is not particularly fast, and thirty-some years of smoking have ensured that his lungs are not in the best shape either. He finds himself trailing behind when he is running after John, the soldier, and Sherlock, who magically, never ever tires, and he hates this so he pushes himself harder to keep up. But he struggles, and falls behind, and slows down and gasps for breath. He remembers, once, leaning against the wall of an alleyway, choking on air, his chest burning, trying to breathe. Sherlock had been by his side. 'On three.' the detective had whispered. 'We run.' Greg had shaken his head, gasping, whispering things like 'no, no I can't.' Sherlock had been adamant. 'You have to.' Greg is annoyed. 'I'm old. And I smoke.' Sherlock's hand had found his, and Greg had been surprised. 'You quit.' Sherlock had said. And then he had set off running, pulling Greg by the hand, and they had run. Together.

**He likes loose-fitting clothes. **He does not like clothes to cling to his body. On days off he wears huge shirts and sweatpants and it's much more comfortable.

**He's made a point of eating whenever Sherlock comes into his office. **The detective eats next to nothing, less on cases, somehow getting by on air and coffee and nicotine patches. He's better now than he was, but he is so thin that Lestrade is frightened and he eats constantly in Sherlock's presence, always offering the detective food, and hoping to entice him into eating. Once or twice Sherlock will accept it, and this gives him hope.

**He has learned ways to get Sherlock to eat. **The easiest is to wait until he is either going off on a long tangent about something or thinking very hard. By simply putting food into his hand while he is distracted, Greg will usually be rewarded by Sherlock stuffing the food into his mouth without recognizing it. Sometimes saying things like 'Oh, there's one doughnut left, I better go give it to Anderson' will do the trick, but mostly he manages to get food into Sherlock by plunking a plate down in front of him, looking him right in the eyes, and saying with all the authority he can muster: 'Sherlock Holmes. Eat your food.' Sherlock will grumble and sulk and complain, but he will eat, and Lestrade will be happy.

**He wishes he were taller. **He is nowhere near short, but nor is he tall, and he wishes to be tall because Gregson is easily five inches above him and it drives him absolutely mad. Sherlock is taller as well, and this makes any sliver of authority he might be able to get over the man even less powerful. In arguments with either of the two he straightens up to his full height (which is never enough) and more than once he has wished to be taller and even considered getting those shoes with a large heel just so that these things are fair.

**He tans well in the summer and thought it will fade, it often lasts year-round. **

**He has brown eyes and he does not mind. **Brown eyes are not plain to him, not boring or dull, brown eyes can be stunningly beautiful just as much as blue or green or grey, but still his favourite colour of eye remains Sherlock's blue-green-grey, a mess of all the three, and _favourite colour_ is not quite right a term because his favourite kind of eye colour is the type where no one colour is dominant, where it changes and fluctuates and deepens and is sparkled with stars and flecks and glints. He loves to look into eyes where there seems to be a world behind, and this is what he sees when he looks at Sherlock.

**His voice has always been very deep. **'Unique' people say about his voice, and he wonders if this is a compliment or not, but he cannot remember it ever being anything but the way it is. There was no awkward transition that he can remember, as a teenager, while his friends' voices broke and splintered and varied in pitch he simply spoke in a slightly higher tone one day, and a lower one the next. He was very young, eleven or twelve, and since then his voice has been the same.

**He does not like to talk to strangers. **He is not the one to make idle chitchat in the line at Tesco, waiting at a bus stop, on the tube. He is often lost in his own thoughts anyways. If people speak to him, he will reply, and he will chat easily, pleasantly, but he will never turn to anyone just simply to talk to them. He is not entirely comfortable doing so, and he does not. It is no great loss to him. He likes to talk to people, and he will be funny and amiable and pleasant, and he will enjoy it, but he never seeks out people to talk with.

**He never asks for directions when he is lost. **

**Originally, it was supposed to be the other way round. **Sherlock was supposed to need him. But no, he needs Sherlock so much, for everything, and he does not mind at all. Greg loves to need Sherlock. Greg loves to wake up and have a reason to get dressed and go to work and smile and laugh and live, and this reason is Sherlock Holmes and one day he will tell him how grateful he is once he is, once he has worked out the right way to say it.

**He will never ever ever get tired of the way Sherlock's eyes light up when he hands him a new case. **

**He thinks on his feet. **He lives on spontaneity. Waiting, planning, decision-making is not a strength with him. He is intuitive, following instinct, logic-be-damned. Perhaps this is why Sherlock enjoys his presence so much.

**Boxers, not briefs. **

**He loves reading John's blog. **He checks it religiously, hoping for updates. Sherlock is not the type to chat about a case once he has finished, unless it is to boast about how extremely clever he was in solving it, and he leaves out little details. If the case does not come from Lestrade, he does not hear about it. He likes to read John's writing and he smiles at the stories that are so invariably Sherlock. And yet sometimes, still, he feels something akin to hearing the details of a party he had not been invited to, something like sadness, like jealousy. But he ignores that, and it goes away.

**He overhears Sherlock say once that Gregson is the smartest of Scotland Yard and Greg does not know why he feels suddenly like crying and is very annoyed at himself for being so hurt. **

**He is not very adventurous with his drinking. **Beer. A label he recognizes. Usually dark.

**He has strong personal ethics. **He compromises this sometimes for his work, and without hesitancy for Sherlock, and sometimes this scares him a bit and he wonders if he is losing his hold on who he is, on being himself, on being human.

**He always holds doors for strangers. **

**He once carried Sherlock for almost twenty minutes. **The idiot had broken his leg being _stupid_ and had been _stupidly_ trying to walk on it and they're out in the country somewhere, far out of London, and Sherlock complains the whole way and whines and struggles and sulks at being carried like a child and Lestrade grumbles and curses and scolds him for being so _stupid_ and pretends he had not been terrified. Sherlock is very light in his arms.

**His favourite memories of being a teenager is when they would all go out in groups to see films. **

**Earbuds do not fit in his ears. **They fit okay in his left ear, but he can't get them to sit in the right ear – god knows why, his ears are too small or too tight or built wrong – and they are uncomfortable and make his ears ache after awhile. He manages it for running with the kind that hook over the ear as well as sitting inside. When he is just listening to music he prefers headphones anyways. He likes the music to surround him.

**He tries to use Sherlock's methods sometimes, tries to deduce, but it never works. **He cannot see the world as Sherlock does.

**He tries to teach Sherlock to play football and rugby. **Neither ends well.

**In the years before Sherlock detoxed, Greg and Sherlock would row often. **The reason would be always the same – Sherlock's cocaine use, Sherlock's lack of sleep and nourishment, Sherlock's inability to accept the help that Lestrade so desperately wanted to offer him. Mostly it was the cocaine, and he remembers anger rising in his chest at even the sight of that little black case – oh so innocent looking – and it was not anger at Sherlock, and not even at the drug itself, the substance that was ruining him, hurting him, wasting him, but at the world that had driven Sherlock to this. He remembers screaming and fighting and leaving the hole-in-the-wall flat in tears. He remembers lying up at night worrying, regretting the words he had said. He does not like to fight, and least of all with Sherlock. He has nightmares of Sherlock dying and he prays that the last thing he and Sherlock say to each other will not be on angry terms.

**He hopes – and if all goes well, he should, but still he prays – that he will die before Sherlock. **He cannot imagine a world in which Sherlock is not there. He imagines such a world must be dull and without colour and vibrancy and that he would very much not like to live there.


	9. Part 9

**His best grades in school were not in Science, but in Drama. **

**His wedding was in Autumn. **It was a big wedding, in a church, and it was beautiful. He remembers standing at the altar, shaking.

**There are exactly nine boxes in his spare room, labelled with the letter C. **These are things that his ex wife did not take with her when she left, and that he has not yet bothered to throw out. Eight of these are large cardboard boxes. The ninth is a blue trunk, and inside of it is the wedding dress she wore when they were married. This has been kept, not only as a memory, but in case one day they had a daughter who could wear it.

**When he was young, he carved his name into his bedroom ceiling with a switchblade. **As far as he knows, it is still there.

**He adores Chris Nolan's Batman trilogy. **

**He is trying to learn how to cook. **He can do little more than boil water and toss salad, and even those have some degree of difficulty to them. But baking and cooking are relaxing, and he enjoys them, and even in boiling water for pasta there is satisfaction. He has been living off takeaway and pub food for too long. He will make his own meals. One day, maybe, he will be brave enough to invite Molly over to eat with him.

**His favourite teacher as a kid was called Mr. Melville. **To this day, he does not know the man's first name. He taught secondary school History and Greg, who had always abhorred History, loved every minute of it.

**His father is absolutely his hero. ** Christopher Lestrade was his very best friend growing up, his teacher, his mentor, but most of all his hero. Greg was his only son, and indeed his only child. He was a police officer. He taught Greg to shoot, to fish, to ride a bike, to treat women well, to skip stones across water, and to be a good man. He calls his dad as much as he can, just to talk. Greg's father is the best man that Greg has ever known, and they have always had an incredibly close relationship.

**He tried drugs once. **This was while he was in school, and it made him very ill, and after a brief stay in the hospital he had vowed never again. He was stupid, and he regretted it for a very long time.

**He loves the novel 'A Tale Of Two Cities'. **

**There's a flat white hatbox on top of a bookshelf in his spare room. **Inside there is a mobile, made of wire, meant for above a child's crib. There are little hand-painted wooden stars that dangle from the wire. This was made by his grandfather, for his father, when his father himself was a child. It hung above his crib when he was an infant. He has no child to use it for. He has no crib to hang it over.

**His hair is horrible in that if he does not comb it, it sticks up every which way and looks a general mess. **

**He loves thunderstorms. **They are beautiful. Sherlock does not see it. He gets skittish and scared when he is alone in the presence of thunder and lightning. Lestrade can remember nights and days he has spent sitting beside Sherlock on his run-down bed in his run-down flat, where the roof will leak and the window will let in a draft. He spends this time watching the storm through the huge window with Sherlock by his side. He teaches Sherlock to count the seconds between lightning and thunder, and Sherlock says that it seems a very ineffective means of calculation. The detective is never frightened of these storms when they watch them together.

**Sometimes he would like nothing more than to smack Gregson upside the head with a lot of force. **

**It makes him immeasurably proud to carry his identification round in his wallet. **Greg Lestrade, Detective Inspector of Scotland Yard. The problem is that those are rather expensive to replace, and Sherlock could probably open a museum with the amount of those things he's stolen off of Greg.

**The Yard has a big football match every year. **And every year, Lestrade's team loses to Gregson's.

**He can crack eggs using only one hand. **Despite his less-than-perfect culinary skills, he's able to pull off this impressive trick with a snap of his wrist. Sherlock taught him this once, and Greg does not know why the detective had known this in the first place or why he had thought it important enough to store on his hard-drive. It took him hours to perfect the trick, but he had done it, and he always feels proud whenever he can deliver that little snap and crack the egg perfectly with one hand, even though whatever he is making turns out a mess later.

**His mother passed away a few years ago. **

**He hates when people look down on Iain Dimmock. **He is young, and he has chronic migraines, but he has worked just as hard – if not harder – than anyone else, and he deserves just as much respect.

**His wristwatch is one of the most expensive things he owns.** Sherlock bought it for him as a birthday gift one year.

**Christmas is his favourite holiday. **He loves the entire Christmas season.

**He has given Sherlock no less than fourteen haircuts in the five years that he had known him. **Sherlock dislikes strangers touching his hair, and cannot be bothered to do it himself (which, admittedly, would probably turn out a mess). The solution is that he grows it out long until Lestrade trims it for him.

**After his wife handed that ring back to him on the beach, she got on a plane for London and told him not to follow her. **He waited a day, and then he went home. She had taken all of her belongings, and there was a note on the table saying he would hear from her lawyer to settle the divorce. And that was the end.

**He will often skip breakfast. **He goes into work very early, and leaves very late. He forgets breakfast sometimes, which means around nine he becomes very hungry and ends up eating candy bars and donuts as a breakfast.

**Sally Donovan is one of his best friends. **She's brave, she's tough, she's funny and she's an incredibly hard worker. He hates the way she treats Sherlock, and vice versa. Greg wants people to get along. But having the two anywhere near each other is like a bomb waiting to go off.

**He always holds the door for women. **Strangers, friends, colleagues. Sally is the only one who objects. "You're being sexist." she quips as she stops short a few steps before where he is holding the door open. "Women can open the door themselves." She folds her arms and glares at him until he folds and goes through the doorway himself.

**Sherlock has come so very far since the day they met, and Greg has never been prouder of anyone.**

**When he was sixteen, he let his friend pierce his ear. **With a sewing needle. He got an infection, and his parents were furious, but he never regretted it. He wore an earring proudly for a few years before he let it close. The skin has healed over completely, and he can no longer tell where the piercing was.

**He loves the beginning of autumn, when the leaves change and the leaves fall. **He loves the feel of them crunching on the pavement. But when the trees are bare, the skies gray, when the leaves turn brown and die, and it all goes cold without snowing... This lesser part of the season he does not enjoy much at all.

**They tried for one year and a half to have a child. **After this year and a half, they went to a doctor. He remembers locking himself in the bathroom and crying for a very long time. He is wrong. He is defective, tainted, worthless, broken. He cannot have children, and this will haunt him always.

**Three years ago, his father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. **


	10. Part 10

Chapter 10! I would like to thank everyone who supported this fic, whether by reviewing, faving, following, or just reading and enjoying. If you are reading this right now, I really appreciate you.

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**He writes an anonymous check every month to a charity that works with spinal injury and paraplegia. **

**His blood type is O positive. **Universal donor.

**He has two pet names for Sherlock. **_Blue eyes_ is one, _Sunshine_ the other, both of which he uses sparingly and neither of which, curiously, Sherlock seems to mind.

**He gets a haircut every few months. **He doesn't like it too long. It tickles his neck.

**When he was young, he was attacked by a nest of hornets. **He stepped on their nest while climbing a tree and they came out in a swarm. He counts his stings later and finds twenty-two, mostly on his face, neck and hands.

**He refers to anyone under forty-five or so as a kid. **

**He's learned to appreciate mornings. **Growing up he was a creature of the night, staying up late and sleeping well into the day. He wales up early for work these days, and he's become rather smitten with the early morning. It's silent and beautiful, sunshine and calm and quiet. There's something magical in it.

**He has yet to meet a type of donut that he will not eat. **

**He has not yet deleted his wife from his contact list on his mobile phone. **This is partly because Lestrade is miserable with technology and is not quite sure how to do so, but also because he has never been very good at letting go.

**His mother miscarried once, about two years after he was born. **His parents never had another child and he has wondered more than once what it would be like to have that two-years-younger brother of sister.

**He loves the Christmas holiday more than any other. **

**He calls his co-workers often by their first name. **Usually it's _Bradstreet_ or _Donovan, _to everyone,but Greg is the only one to address everyone by first name. No one ever minds.

**Gregson is the only exception. **Lestrade addresses him only as 'Gregson.' Gregson addresses Lestrade as 'Gregory' to drive Lestrade crazy.

**Mycroft and Gregson are the only two people who call him by his full name. **He was born Gregory but everyone has used Greg since he was very young.

**Macbeth is his favourite Shakespeare tragedy.**

**He owns a car, but he considers selling it. **He forgets, sometimes, that walking is a miracle, takes it for granted. It is far to Scotland Yard from his house, but walking it would make him feel better. There is the tube, as well, or a bus to take. He doesn't need the car.

**The comic book villan he hates the most is Howard Stark.** Not a villan? It doesn't matter. You can lie and cheat and plot and steal and blow things up, but neglectful father always wins in Lestrade's books. Or loses. Whatever.

**He kept every song he ever wrote. **They're all in a cardboard box underneath his bed.

**Sherlock is the first name on his speed dial. **Sherlock is also the only name: it was a great struggle to program the damn thing, and Sherlock is the only name he really needs there.

**When he was a boy, his family had a dog named Rusty. **Rusty was a basset hound with long floppy ears. When Greg was six, Rusty was struck by a car and killed. His father offered many times to buy Greg another dog, but Greg wanted no dog but Rusty.

**He drops his mobile phone numerous times a day, but it has not yet broken. **

**He hates lifts and always takes the stairs. **

**He has tried numerous fertility medications, treatments, therapies. **He has tried near everything: the good, the bad, the expensive, the ridiculous.

**He loves giving Christmas gifts. **He buys everyone in his division presents. Even Gregson – they have their differences, sure, and he always uses a lot of tape on Gregson's gifts, just to frustrate him, but it's Christmas. And that's a time to put aside your differences. He loves shopping in the crowds, wrapping presents in his sitting room, the thrill of finding the perfect gift and the look on the face of whoever opens it. He buys gifts for everyone he can just for that thrill.

**A promotion would be brilliant, sure, but truthfully he loves where he is. **

**He was going to pursue music. **Long before DI had even crossed his mind, he had anticipated a life of busking on street corners, practising in basements, loading amps into the back of a van, rocking out in full lights onstage. He and his band were going places. Maybe one day they'd split and he'd branch off into a solo career. Put out a few dozen albums. Be a household name. He was sixteen when he made those plans, and that was back when he was well and truly happy. He misses those days, sometimes. He misses the dream.

**If he could change one thing about the world, just in a small way, it would be to exempt children from suffering. **

**He bought Molly Hooper a bouquet of flowers once. **Yellow roses. Six of them. He sat in his car debating, worrying about her reaction. Not that she might reject the offering of flowers, but that she might accept. That she might smile her beautiful smile and take them and thank him and then they might go on a date and fall in love and one day she would break his heart. He got cold feet at the last moment and put the flowers in a vase on his counter and did not deliver them. After a day he puts them in the bin because he doesn't like to look at them.

**He likes to wear the colour red. **It makes him feel happy.

**There used to be a stray cat that came by his back door every night. **He was never quite sure where it came from. The cat appeared every night for a few weeks, at eleven-thirty without fail. It was gray, with tangled fur and big blue eyes. It took four nights for the cat to trust him enough to sniff his outstretched hand. By day six he could approach it without it running off. On day ten, he was able to pet it. He fed it every night: milk, and sometimes tunafish or chicken, and sat out on the porch with the little cat and watched what few stars he could see. By day fifteen, the cat would come inside his home. By day twenty, it would sit on the couch with him. And then, after three weeks had gone by, it stopped coming. He hasn't seen it since.

**He can't sleep unless his room is in absolute darkness. **His wife was always leaving lights on, or blinds open, or the telly flashing down the hall. The light comes through his eyelids and bothers him to no end. He tapes paper over his laptop and his mobile because the tiny flashing power lights drive him mad.

**A perfect date is a cinema date. **

**He has four closest mates (outside of work, Sherlock and John.) **They're not close anymore, not really. They've all moved on with their lives, but the five of them struggle to stay in touch for old times sake. Paul, Fred, Chris, and Matt are their names and in school the five of them were as tight as anything. But Paul, Fred, Chris and Matt are married now, with families, and they eat dinner at five and spend holidays and birthdays with their kids and talk about schools and things. Greg doesn't mind. Good for them. It's just weird, a bit, growing apart.

**He's always excited to get Christmas cards from those four. **This is because Paul, Fred, Chris and Matt always include pictures of their kids, and he loves to see, loves to watch them grow up. Greg loves Christmas cards, period. He rarely gets more than ten but they always brighten his day considerably and he puts them up on the wall with tape and smiles whenever he sees them.

**A text from Sherlock inviting him onto a case never fails to make him smile, no matter how upset he might be at the time. **

**It's selfish, but he always feels a twinge of anger towards people who choose not to have kids. **They can, and they don't. Completely unfounded anger, of course, it's a matter of personal choice and he has no right – But it still seems like a loss and a waste and a blow to whatever broke inside of him when he learned that he was sterile.

**He pulls his covers over his head when sleeping after having watched horror movies. **Childish thing to do, but no one is there to see him. If he lies there looking around his room, every shadow looks like a murderer or a leering face or a ghostly child or a hand with a knife. Under the covers it looks like the inside of the covers. Problem solved. Unless he suffocates under there one night.

**He went to a tarot card reader once. **That was during his Uni days – he was out with some mates and they figured to blow some money on it. The woman told him that he would be married and have children. If he ever meets her again, he wants a refund.

**He's jealous of his parents' relationship. **They married right out of high school, and loved each other for near forty years, bickering, but never fighting. They made a mutual decision to divorce years after Greg had left home and stayed friends until the day his mother died.

**He knows a handful of Shakespeare's best soliloquies by heart. **They are the remains of his theatre days, barely there but hard ingrained into his memory. He recites them sometimes when he his home alone and bored, just to himself, and he does not admit to doing so.

**It was five in the morning when his father called him to tell him that his mother was dead. **That was two years ago. He had cried over the phone. His father had not.

**Greg has seen his father cry only once. **That was the night his grandfather – his father's father - had died. Greg had been scared and run away because his daddy did not cry. Not ever. He never witnessed that again – his father was careful never to cry in Greg's presence. Greg had always admired that. The strength. To be strong for someone else. His father is the strongest and the best man he has ever known, and he hopes never to see him cry again.

**He knows that he's not _that_ smart. **Especially with arithmetic, or with words. So really there is no reason for Sherlock to point it out all the time.

**He has vowed to himself that, if he were ever in another relationship, he would never cheat. **Never. He has been on the short end of that, and has vowed to never make anyone feel that way. If there was a problem he would break it clean off. No cheating. No lying. No pretending. No lying up nights crying or coming home to an empty house or praying that thing were going to turn around. It hurt too much.

**He was a bit of a rebel, growing up. **

**One of his favourite pass-times as a child was climbing up to the roof of his house and jumping off into a stack of hay or leaves. **He would do this with Caroline, and they would push each other off and dare each other to fall backwards or to do clever dives or to just spread out their arms and fall. Then they'd land, giggling on a mountain of soft hay and wrestle about on the ground before climbing back up to the roof. His mum always scolded them for 'dangerous behaviour' but they never stopped doing it until Caroline broke her arm doing a swan dive and the roof became Off Limits.

**Once, in high school, he jumped into the Thames in January for a dare. **

**Sally Donovan was sixteen years old when he met her for the first time. **

**He's ashamed of being infertile. **He knows that is nothing to be ashamed of. He cannot help it.

**He loves to talk to John. **John Watson is one of those people he can tell anything and everything. Sometimes they go for walks, or meet in pubs, and just _talk_, and it's brilliant.

**He's been fishing with his dad since he was four years old. **He's still not very good at it.

**He is sad. **Very sad. He has been very sad for a very long time and his heart hurts from it and he cries sometimes, often, and no medication takes it away. He is empty and he is lonely and he is sad, though he hides it very well.

**He is happy. **He is, really. There is a wonderful world that he lives in, and it is a world with friends and with music and with work and with Sherlock. All of these things make him very happy. He loves his life, even when it hurts. And he will always, always, always love Sherlock.

Even when it hurts.


	11. Part 11

**Whenever he buys donuts, he always buys one with sprinkles. **Sherlock's favourite. Just in case the detective happens to stop by. It's rare he does these days, with John, and even rarer that he will actually eat it but Lestrade will buy it every time. Just in case. He'll never stop.

**He loves his mum, but he has always been closest to his father. **

**He likes driving late at night with the windows open. **You barely hear the car tires on the road, but you hear other things in the distance: rubbish bins and cars and dogs and city things. But all that feels far away, like you're in a bubble or down a well and all that's real is the car you're in and even that doesn't feel solid. You ghost along the roads in the dark and you feel a bit like a ghost. Like you're fading away as you're driving. It's a bit spooky, but he likes the way it feels.

**The first proper song he learned how to play on his guitar was 'Stairway To Heaven' **

**He's not too fussed with big questions, to be honest. **Things like 'why am I here' and 'where do I go after I die'. He tries to live in the present. He believes that this life is what matters. What you do. Not why.

**There was a period of his life (somewhere after 'astronaut' and before 'rock god') that he wanted to be a schoolteacher. **Young kids, four or five or six. Lestrade has always loved kids and been good with kids and he could think of nothing better than being with kids all day and teaching them and playing with them and inspiring them.

**There's a small selfish part of him that would give almost anything to one-up Gregson at just one thing. **

**He feels stupid next to Sherlock. **And he is stupid next to Sherlock, hell, everyone is, but that doesn't mean it's a very nice feeling.

**Christmas lights are the greatest invention he has ever seen. **There is nothing like seeing London lit up for Christmas, especially after dark. It gives him a warm feeling inside he cannot define. There is something special there. He would go so far as to say it is his favourite part of the holiday. Lights.

**He tends to root for the underdog. **

**He and Mrs. Hudson get on very well. **She's kind, and friendly, and sharp, and she makes good biscuits and cakes and things. They talk sometimes, over biscuits and cakes and tea and he always enjoys her company. She's deeply fond of Sherlock, and Sherlock of her, and Greg has more respect for her than perhaps he'll ever let on.

**He can't help but miss the countryside sometimes. **

**He meets a little girl in the Baker Street tube stop one morning, as he's waiting for his train. **She couldn't have been more than five or six, in a little red coat and shiny black name is Tamara and he says that it's a lovely name and they strike up a lovely conversation until Tamara's mother swoops down and yanks her daughter away from him, glaring at Lestrade all the while. He can hear her scolding the little girl as she walks away about talking to strangers, and hell, he wouldn't want his kids talking to weird old men in the tube stop either, but he's still sad. He's a detective and he's seen kids die because they talked to weird old men in tube stops, and that hurts too. He hates it sometimes. The world.

**He has a lot of nice suits. **Expensive ones. All courtesy of Mycroft who insists he "dress appropriately" when they meet to discuss Sherlock and supplies the formal wear for him. Greg's rather fond of getting nice new suits, even though it creeps him out a bit that Mycroft knows all his measurements.

**He gets his love of Christmas from his mother. **He's his father's son, in looks and in temperament, but if there's one thing he and his mother can see eye to eye on it is their almost fanatical love for the holiday season.

**He was expecting a lecture from his dad when he showed him that he had let his mate Syd pierce his ear with a sewing needle. **Instead, his dad just laughed.

**He feeds ducks. **He likes them. They're funny.

**When he watches films, he always stays for the credits. **

**In the winter, after dark, he likes to go out and just walk. **There is something about the cold and the dark that makes everything more real. He can't explain that. It just is.

**He has a lot of thoughts and ideas and things that might make a good book. **At least some poems. Except when he tries to put thoughts and ideas and things down on paper it all gets messed up somewhere in the transition from his head to his pencil and everything ends up stupid. He used to write books and poems and stuff when he was a kid but he never finished them because he got so bloody frustrated with that transition thing. Nothing sounded the way it did in his head. Maybe he's a thinker, not a writer, but his thoughts don't make all that much sense either. That's probably why he's a detective. You don't have to think deep things and you don't have t write them down.

**He can't sleep with socks on his feet. **Not if he's awake enough to think about it. Sometimes he falls down on his bed and goes to sleep right in his clothes, socks and everything, but if he's in his bed wearing socks the socks annoy him to no end. He has to take them off or else that's all he thinks about and he can't get to sleep.

**He is comfortable with a leadership role but he will not actively seek one out. **

**Sometimes he feels like crying. **Sometimes it's for no reason at all, at least not directly. Sometimes, if he's alone, he does cry. Other times he holds it in or ignores it until the feeling goes away.

**There is no one on earth he hates more than James Moriarty. **The very name makes his hands curl into fists, his chest burn with anger, and he knows that if he had a clean shot he would take it without the very slightest hesitation.

**He's a great fan of James Bond. **

**Every time he hugs his father, his father is a little bit weaker. **And it breaks his heart.

**He is secretly terrified of being buried alive. **The very idea makes his throat close and his heart pick up speed. "When I'm dead." he says to Sherlock one day. "Cut off my head or something. Just to make sure I'm really dead." Then a thought occurs to him. "You can't keep it, though. My head. I don't want to be in your fridge when I'm dead."

**He's not a big talker. **He's a bit quiet, unless it's about work, or Sherlock, or something he's really terribly passionate about. He can hold a conversation fine, but he's unlikely to strike one up out of the blue.

**He cried at the end of Batman Begins then, and he cries at the end of Batman Begins now. **

**Often when Sherlock has been sick or in hospital, Greg would read books aloud to him. **It's a silly thing, but it does not stop him from doing it. Usually he does this when Sherlock is unconscious or sleeping but sometimes he has been awake, and curiously, the detective has never protested.

**There is a switch at his place that does not turn on a light. **Nothing happens when you flick it: nothing that he can tell, at least. He has never known what that switch was for. He tries not to flip the switch too much. He secretly worries about setting off bombs in other countries and things like that, which is honestly one of the stupidest things he has ever worried about. He has a lot of stupid thoughts like that sometimes. They go away pretty quick to be replaced with logical reasoning, but it crosses his mind whenever he accidentally flips that mystery switch to apologize to the people he might possibly be killing.

**He's not a fan of that nicotine gum. **It doesn't taste very nice and it doesn't work all that well either.

**He had a fantastic sweet tooth as a kid and a teenager. **Anything sugar. His personal favourite were those pop rocks. Being older now, he's not sure what the allure was.

**He remains on a Christmas-card basis with the American spinal surgeon who saved him from a life of paraplegia. **

**He is not good at debates or press conferences or at any kind of improvised speech. **He needs time to think about things before he says them. Otherwise he just sounds dumb, and there's no time for him to get his thoughts all straight enough to even know what he's saying.

**He tries to keep his feet firmly on the ground but there is a part of him somewhere inside that is a good bit of a dreamer. **He doesn't show that side a lot, or arguably at all, but it's there somewhere. It always surprises him.

**He can never sleep after cases that involve children hurt or killed. **

**He thinks he might want to be cremated when he dies. **He's signed up to donate every organ he has, but there's still the rest of him to deal with. It's easier that way. It takes up less space and less money, and being a dead body under ground with a tombstone and everything is really depressing. Granted, the thought of dead people burning in a fire freaks him out a bit. Also, he always wonders about what if someone doesn't clean out the crematorium properly and bits of other people's ashes get mixed in with his. Not that that would bother him much because he would be dead, but it is a bit of a weird thought. He wonders who would even want his ashes. Who a can of dead him is going to be forced upon. He thinks it would be nice to have his ashes scattered somewhere, except he's heard that that can be dangerous to wildlife and things. He might even leave his body to science, only because Sherlock would be rather cross with him if he didn't. He always imagines Sherlock pulling him apart after he's dead. Thinking about all that is kind of sad, so he tries not to. He wishes your body would just disappear when you died. Evaporate into the air. Everything would be easier.

**He has a really big crush on Karen Gillan. **Slightly innapropriate, but rather hard to control.

**Dartmoor was his last vacation. **Before that, his failed Let's-Fix-Things vacation with his now ex-wife. Before that, he hadn't taken a vacation for a very long time. Greg's not too big on the travelling thing. Everything he needs is right here.

**They never had a proper honeymoon. **

**It's tough not to punch Sherlock sometimes. **He's annoying, he's arrogant, he's, well, Sherlock. Greg gets frustrated with him a lot, but he knows the very second he might lay a hand on him he will regret it.

**It bothers him when Sherlock works on cases with Gregson. **

**Sometimes the paper spells his name wrong. **It shouldn't annoy him, but it does a bit. Leastrade, Lestrad, Le Strade, Lastrade, Lesrede, Lestred, among others.

**What he does makes little tiny differences in people's lives and he loves that. **

**When he is upset, what he really wants is for someone to hold him. **No words. Just a hug. A strong hug, like his dad gave. No talking or petting his hair or pretending it will get better, just holding and holding until he is okay again. He craves this secretly when he cries, when he's sad or lost or hurt. Someone to hold him.

**His wife's wedding dress is in a trunk in his spare room. **She did not take it with her and he cannot get rid of it, so it stays there.

**Rock and roll is the best music. **

**He's good with handcuffs. **He can snap them on your wrists before you even saw it coming. What he can't do is twirl them round his finger. You see detectives do that in films. He tries it when he is bored but he drops them or the chain gets wrapped around his finger or the other end smacks him in the face and leaves a mark.

**He feels an immensely strong sense of duty toward Sherlock. **He is responsible for more than his own life: for Sherlock's as well. He has never had that feeling before.

**He loves vinyl. **There's nothing like it. No CD or mp3 file, no cassette tape can ever compare to a big disk of vinyl. He loves that ipod of his, but records always win. It's a nostalgia thing.

**He's been called nostalgic. **It's true. Except it's not the old days so much that he's missing as much as the people in them. He misses people. Not time.

**He's a different person now from who he used to be.** But it's not a bad thing.


End file.
